FULL TEXT! The Ibogaine Story: Report on the STATEN ISLAND PROJECT

[Richard_smoker]

The Ibogaine Story: Report on the STATEN ISLAND PROJECT

Full Text to be Posted, Chapter by chapter.
Text is public-domain and shareware is encouraged.
Please enjoy. -RS


Table of Contents
* INTRODUCTION.
* CHAPTER 1: The War With the Junkies
* CHAPTER 2: Howard Lotsof
* CHAPTER 3: Dhoruba Moore
* CHAPTER 4: Dana Beal
* CHAPTER 5: The Staten Island Project
* CHAPTER 6: Bob Sisko
* CHAPTER 7: Stanley Glick
* CHAPTER 8 : Nico Adriaans
* CHAPTER 9: Jon Parker
* CHAPTER 10: Carlo Contoreggi
* CHAPTER 11: Geerte
* CHAPTER 12: Agent of Co-incidence
* CHAPTER 13: Bwiti
* CHAPTER 14: "A Child Playing at Draughts..."
* CHAPTER 15: Molliver's Travels
* CHAPTER 16: The Passover Plot
* CHAPTER 17: Cures not Wars
* CHAPTER 18: Deborah Mash's Brain



Introduction.
NAKED LUNCH DEPOSITION: TESTIMONY CONCERNING A SICKNESS

I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness... Most survivors do not remember the deiirium in detail. I apparently took detailed notes on sickness and delirium...

The Sickness is drug addiction and I was an addict for fifteen years. When I say addict I mean addict to junk (generic term for opium and/or derivatives including all synthetics from demerol to palfium). I have used junk in many forms: morphine, heroin, dilaudid, eukodal, pantopon, diocodid, diosane, opium, demerol, dolophine, palfium. I have smoked junk, eaten it, sniffed it, injected it in vein-skin-muscle, inserted it in rectal suppositories. The needle is not important. Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction. When I speak of drug addiction I do not refer to keif, marijuana or any preparation of hashish, mescaline, Bannistria caapi, LSD6, Sacred Mushrooms or any other drug of the hallucinogen group... There is no evidence that the use of any hallucinogen results in physical dependence. The action of these drugs is physiologically opposite to the action of junk. A lamentable confusion between the two classes of drugs has arisen owing to the zeal of the U.S. and other narcotic departments.

I have seen the exact manner in which the junk virus operates through fifteen years of addiction. The pyramid of junk, one level eating the level below (it is no accident that junk higher-ups are always fat and the addict in the street is always thin) right up to the top or tops since there are many junk pyramids feeding on peoples of the world and all built on basic principles of monopoly:

* 1--Never give anything away for nothing.
* 2--Never give more than you have to give (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait.
* 3--Always take everything back if you possibly can.

The Pusher always gets it all back. The addict needs more and more junk to maintain a human form...buy off the Monkey.

Junk is the mold of monopoly and possession. The addict stands by while his junk legs carry him straight in on the junk beam to relapse. Junk is quantitative and accurately measurable. The more junk you use the less you have and more you have the more you use. All the hallucingen drugs are considered sacred by those who use them--there are Peyote Cults and Bannisteria Cults, Hashish Cults and Mushroom Cults--"the Sacred Mushrooms of Mexico enable a man to see God"--but no one ever suggested that junk is sacred. There are no opium cults. Opium is profane and quantitative like money. I have heard that there was once a beneficent non-habit-forming junk in India. It was called soma and is pictured as a beautiful blue tide. If soma ever existed the Pusher was there to bottle it and monopolize it and sell it and it turned into plain old time JUNK.

Junk is the ideal product...the ultimate merchandize. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy... The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client. He pays his staff in junk.

Junk yields a basic formula of "evil" virus: The Algebra of Need. The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite. Assuming a self-righteous position is nothing to the the purpose unless your purpose be to keep the junk virus in operation. And junk is a big industry. I recall talking to an American who worked for the Aftosa Commission in Mexico. Six hundred a month plus expense account:

"How long will the epidemic last?" I enquired.

"As long as we can keep it going... And yes...maybe the aftosa will break out in South America," he said dreamily.

If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the Addict in the Street. And stop tilting quixotically for the "higher ups," so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no more junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it.

Addicts can be cured or quarantined--that is, allowed a morphine ration under minimal supervision like typhoid carriers. When this is done, junk pyramids of the world will collapse. So far as I know, England is the only country to apply this method to the junk problem. They have about five hundred quarantined addicts in the U.K. In another generation when the quaratined addicts often die off and pain killers operating on a non-junk principle are discovered, the junk virus will be like smallpox, a closed chapter--a medical curiosity.

The vaccine that can regelate the junk virus to a land-locked past is in existrence. This vaccine is the Apomorphine Treatment discovered by an English doctor whose name I must withhold pending his permission to use it and to quote from his book covering thirty years of apomorphine treatment of addicts and alcoholics. The compound apomorphine is is formed by boiling morphine with hydrochloric aicd. It was discovered years before it was used to treat addicts. For many years the only use for apomorphine which has no narcotic or pain-killing properties was as an emetic to induce vomiting center in the back brain.

I found this vaccine at the end of the junk line. I lived in One room in the Native Quarter of Tangier. I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removedthem except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminalk addiction . I never cleaned or dusted my room. Empty ampule boxes and garbage piled to the ceiling. Light and water long since turned off for non-payment. I did absolutely nothing. I could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours. I was only roused to action when the hourglass of junk ran out. If a friend came to visit--and rarely did since who or what was left to visit--I sat there not caring that he hads entered my field of vision-- a grey screen always blanker and fainter--and not caring when he walked out of it. If he died on the spot I would have sat there looking at my shoe waiting to go through his pockets. Wouldn't you? Because I never had enough junk--no one ever does. Thirty grains of morphine a day it still was not enough. And long waits in front of the drugstore.Delay is a rule in the junk business. The Man is never on time. This is no accident. There are no accidents in the junk world. The addictis taught again and again exactly what will happen if he does not score for his junk ration. Get up that money or else. And suddenly my habit began to jump and jump. Forty, sixty grains a day. And it still was not enough. And I could not pay.

I stood there with my last check in my hand and realiuzed that it was my last check. I took the next plane for London.

The doctor explained to me that apomorphine acts on the back brain to regulate the metabolism and normalize the blood stream in such a way that the enzyme system of addiction is destroyed over a period of four to five days. Once in the back brain is regulated apomorhine can be discontinued and only used in case of relapse. (No one would take apomorphine for kicks. Not one case of addiction to apomorphine has ever been recorded.) I agreed to unergoe treatment and entered a nursing home. For the first twenty-four hours I was literally insane and paranoid as many addicts are in severe withdrawal. This delirium was dispersed by twenty four hours of intensive apomorphine treatment. The doctor showed me the chart. I had received minute amounts of morphine that could not possibly account for my lack of the more severe withdrawal symptoms such as leg and stomach cramps, fever and my own special symptom, The Cold Burn, like a vast hives covering the body and rubbed with menthol. Every addict has his own special symptom that cracks all control. There was a missing factor in the withdrawal equation--that factor could only be apomorphine.

I saw the apomorphine treatment really work. Eight days later I left the nursing home eating and sleeping normally. I remained completety off junk for two full years--a twelve year record. I did relapse for some months as a result of pain and illness. Another apomorphine cure has kept me off junk through this writing.

The apomorphine cure is qualitatively different from other methods of cure. I have tried them all. Short reduction, slow reduction, cortisone, antihistamines, tanquilizers sleeping cures, tolserol, reserpine. None of these cures lasted beyond the first opportunity to relapse. I can say definitely that I was never metabolically cured until I took the apomorphine cure. The overwhelming relapse statistics from the Lexington Narcotic Hospital have led many doctors to say that addiction is not curable. They used a dolophine reduction cure at Lexington and have never tried apomorphine so far as I know. In fact, this method of treatment has been largerly neglected. No research has been done with variations of the apomorphine formula or with synthetics. No doubt substances fifty times stronger than apomorphine *could be developed and the side effect of vomiting eliminated.

--William S. Burroughs 1955

* Alas, apomorphine doesn't work very well, except for a small minority. And side-effects are unpleasant, compared to present-day medications like buprenorphin.--Ed.

Reputation Comments on this post:

[Richard_smoker]

CHAPTER I: The War With the Junkies

It never would have happened if Tom Forcade hadn't shot himself in the head.

Forcade, who'd built HIGH TIMES up to 4 million readers by being six months ahead on new trends, was the only one who could keep the functions of his sprawling Empire reconciled. But by October 1978, hounded by the DEA and acutely depressed by scheming, ambitious underlings as well as the death of his best friend Jack in a plane crash in Florida, the King was at the end of his tether.

He was also wired on coke, and dependent on valium. Which is a funny thing, since he had attended the opening of Howard Lotsof's film SMOKE-IN, and Howard always told everyone important about Ibogaine. But Lotsof's odd factoid about Ibogaine interrupting his heroin/coke addiction in the early '60s had no tangible application for Tom. Lost in the din, Forcade could no longer pick out the one distant trend that could have saved him from his own bad habits. Tom Forcade had run out of time.

In one weekend, Tom committed suicide; Jim Jones snuffed out himself and a thousand followers; Dan White assassinated Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone in San Francisco. And the pendulum began to swing back. It was as if the CIA engineered a coup in a Third World country called the Counterculture.

HIGH TIMES's motivating spark was extinguished. It began to drift. And there was this problem with the junkies in the Art Department.

A few years later John Lombardi would write in ESQUIRE of his wife, Wendy, a talented photographer, strung out on smack. Down on Grand Street around the corner from the SOHO WEEKLY NEWS, Marsha Resnick and Johnny Thunders were living on the couch at Sunset Studios, doing up incredible quantities of smack, which they could afford because she was dealing it out of the back door of the SOHO to a celebrity scene that included John Belushi. Both were often employed by HIGH TIMES art director Tony Brown, who was to end up in 1981 on Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, denouncing her former employer and thanking Jesus for getting her off drugs.

With HIGH TIMES, Forcade pioneered the true marijuana mass market. Before he died he tried to create the same acceptability for his other favorite drug, cocaine. But he always drew the line at heroin. He and Dana Beal had done the first march against CIA heroin July 4, 1971. He knew, even though the William Burroughs groupies were dogging him the year before his suicide to do it, that this was one line the magazine should not cross.

It wasn't that we were intolerant of drugs. After all, HIGH TIMES stood for exuberant promotion of marijuana versus alcohol and cigarettes. We were not into turning our friends in to the cops just because they did problem drugs. But the deal was that they didn't proselytize. '60's survivors knew heroin equalled hepatitis and OD's. Except for coke, HIGH TIMES editorial policy foreshadowed the Dutch "harm reduction" model of market separation of pot and hard drugs.

The trouble, as heroin began to come back at the end of the 70s and the Art Set got strung out, was that they only had two ways to pay their connection on salaries that were minute compared to their prestige. Sell it, which meant turning on new people. Or (since the DEA would not seriously impede the flow of reefer for another five years) they could always set up a pot dealer for a rip.

It worked like this: pot dealers had more marijuana and cash than they knew what to do with. But like all newly rich, they were starved for recognition. So some behind-the-scenes entrepreneur would be drawn to the minor glitterati at the VOICE, SOHO or HIGH TIMES, and find they could gain entry, if they came bearing gifts. They would waive their usual built-in scruples when they discovered their new celebrity friends were dabbling in drugs. Soon their new friends would reveal that they also knew some one in need of a pot connect. After a couple of times, the artist would take a big front and "lose" it. Or report they had been "tied up and ripped off."

Scenario 2 came when credit was eventually cut off, and the celeb's bill with their heroin connection got too high. Then that nice harmless photog or writer (now slightly tarnished) would do a Jekyll and Hyde, and "finger" their pot connection to some junkie stickup artists. For enough of the take to erase their bill and maybe keep themselves in smack for a month, they would send the gunman around to tie you up for real, pistol-whip you, and take everything you owned.

Wendy Lombardi had long since blown her credit when, on the night of Forcade's wake at the Windows of the World, her third old man (the disreputable one with the missing teeth) approached Dana Beal as he was going into his neighbor's place across Bleecker Street. He followed Dana upstairs, where he tried in vain to persuade the neighbor to throw some business his way. After he was brushed off and shown out, Dana turned to his friend and said: "That guy is setting you up for a rip."

Sure enough, the slamlock downstairs had been reversed, leaving it unlocked. After locking it, the neighbor decided to miss the wake. Later that evening he heard people fooling around with the door downstairs, went to the window and yelled, and saw some people fleeing west up Bleecker Street.

Now in a heightened state of vigilance, the neighbor was ready the next day when two gunmen broke in next door and tried to get in via the roof. He chased two pistoleros away with his shotgun. The YIPS made sure the story was disseminated throughout the entire HIGH TIMES scene. Wendy Lombardi's cover was blown.

About a month later, as Dana was knocking on the front door of the YIPster TIMES building at 9 Bleecker, he noticed Wendy and boyfriend bearing down on him from his left. Just as Ben Masel opened the door, a fist blind-sided Dana on his left jaw. But there happened to be almost fifteen people hanging around the ground floor. A tussle ensued, and in a twinkling, the authors of this unprovoked assault were hustled inside, where everything short of major bodily harm was done to get them to give up the identities of the two gunmen and the other gang members.

But such was the underlying non-violence of the YIPS that nothing was done to the two miscreants sufficient to get them to give up anything except a name Wendy blurted out in the beginning-- "John." They were released into the night, minus a shoe.

And then a funny thing happened as the story circulated, especially in the art departments of the VOICE, HIGH TIMES, and the SOHO WEEKLY NEWS. It mutated into its opposite, and the intended victims of the armed robbery became a violent cult (this was right after Jonestown) of YIPPIE breakaways (i.e., not Abbie Hoffman). The seed had been planted.

What it boiled down to was this: Unlike pot, the people's drug, heroin made people totally absorbed with their own jones. Junkies who considered themselves to be celebrities to begin with, looked down upon and despised the potsmoking masses as sheep who were only fit to be shorn of their cash. They sympathized with their friends and believed in their right to rip off the YIPPIES.

Related to this was another problem: YIPSTER TIMES, although the best underground paper in the country, had never gotten its ad- base on a regular footing. It was a party publication, known to be supported by a network of small and middle-sized contributors around the country. In late '78, because the YIP's had just put every cent they could beg or borrow into a "Bring Abbie Home Benefit" at the Felt Forum, (timed for the tenth anniversary of Chicago), the paper was in hiatus. Forcade had not been able to fund it for months before his death. Socially contiguous with HIGH TIMES, it was viewed as a tract instead of a "real" newspaper. When Tom died, the YIPS automatically became outsiders. Wendy depicted her misfortunes as a sinister attack on the journalistic establishment by political fanatics.

Still, 1979, when it came, was year of the fall of the Shah and Somoza. YIPster TIMES resumed publication, better than ever, as OVERTHROW. In May, with great fanfare, the Marijuana Coalition created ROCK AGAINST RACISM to have a concert in Central Park for the end of the pot parade.

In early '79, the YIPS gathered in all the followers of all the smoke-ins and opened Studio 10 at 10 Bleecker. It was an instant success, with five bands a night for $3, dollar Heinekens, and free pot on the bar. Even the indictment of Beal on specious pot conspiracy charges out of Omaha, Nebraska, was dismissed in the fall without going to trial.

Professor Ansley Hamid of John Jay College has studied the effect of the switchover from pot to crack in Jamaican communities in New York City in the early '80s, and described how with pot (which builds no significant tolerance in users) enough capital was retained in the community to start secondary businesses, restaurants, etc., while the coming of crack sucked those communities dry, enriching only the few at the top of the pyramid.

By early 1980 the New York pot scene's inner core was wired on coke and strung out on smack. It was not unusual to see a major dealer (himself coked to the gills) cursing out one of his boys who'd gotten so messed up on schmagoo that they couldn't pay their pot front off. But if you didn't dip into the drugs, you found yourself shut out socially. Contributions to the movement dried up.

Up at HIGH TIMES, which had gone through management changes, a far more ambitious solution to heroin's voracious appetite for money was in the works. D.A. Latimer had come out on top of the latest management shuffle, and his favorite drug after alcohol was always opium. But most of all, that powerhouse in the Art Department wanted to cross the line Forcade wouldn't: to solve the adverse equation of heroin tolerance versus money by vastly expanding their customer base--by using HIGH TIMES directly to mass market smack, like marijuana before it.

A furious struggle ensued. Tom had packed the editorial side with new left veterans of the underground press, who expended much of their waning influence stopping that story. This left the junkies feeling embittered and discriminated against.

The potheads, although they didn't yet know exactly how to express it, knew the dispute went directly to the market separation of soft and hard drugs. The junkies got even: Pot-bashing became fashionable at the VOICE for the whole first half of the next decade. Activism fell out of fashion at HIGH TIMES. But the most interesting reaction came a few months later at the SOHO WEEKLY NEWS.
In early May, an article ran trashing the smoke-in and heralding the death of the marijuana movement. The next week this poster went up advertising a new issue, showing a fashionable female snorting smack. Message: the new wave distinguish themselves from hippies by doing dope. And on the newstand, emblazoned with the headline "NOW HEROIN," was an angelic blond peering from the cover of the SOHO over a mirror with lines of what appeared to be cocaine, but was intended to represent heroin. The lead feature, with the picture on the inside continued of a beautiful male torso injecting heroin, began with the story of Scott, driven, workaholic, trendy gallery owner, cooling out on weekends on smack.

The message was cleverly bracketed with pro forma warnings that heroin, like alcohol and cigarettes, could kill you. But that only added to the romance. The writers clearly felt they had to balance their personal misgivings with the pervasive acceptance of heroin on their immediate scene. The overwhelming thrust was that everyone was doing it. You could do it and not get addicted. They even told you where to cop the best stuff, and how to do up (mix it with lemon juice).

Not a word about clean needles or serum hepatitis. (We didn't know yet about AIDS, although it's now clear that this very scene, including Studio 10, was at the epicenter of the early epidemic.) It was the same damnable article we'd axed from HIGH TIMES. We'd kept it from going out across the country; but by putting the physical survival of the local scene at risk, especially by influencing the bands of ROCK AGAINST RACISM and Studio 10, it challenged New York's traditional role as trend-setter for the country.

Once again, there was a furious brouhaha. The SOHO received numerous complaints, calls, etc. RAR picketed. But the SOHO staff, who considered the article "balanced," never acknowledged the central objection to its subliminal thrust--especially the graphics. Most people don't read, they look at pictures. Consequently, the editors refused to print RAR's letters objecting to putting heroin on the same footing as pot.

Now all the ugly rumors about RAR/YIP came back: that YIPSTER TIMES was not a "real" newspaper deserving of journalistic courtesy; that it was a top-down, violence-prone group; most of all, that we were mere pot advocates with no right to criticize other drugs based on the bitterly learned lessons of our collective experience.

But the nature of YIPPIE! is to thrive on symbiosis with the media. Such was the depth of upset amongst the junkie celebs of the interlocking Art Department, that even though YIP did one of its best-ever rounds of protest during the 1980 Demcon, not a word of it appeared in the VOICE and the SOHO WEEKLY NEWS. (To be fair, this also had something to do with the fact that Abbie--with friends on both papers--was in the process of surfacing from underground. His close partisans always disdained the generation who came after him and succeeded, after the collapse of the Antiwar movement, where he could not: in keeping the revolution alive thorugh the Smoke-Ins. Smoke-ins were never P.C. for them.)

On the neighborhood level most of the best bands playing Studio 10, through their management, were tied into Sunset Studios and the SOHO scene. They were dabbling also, so that the example flowing out to the fans undermined the YIP leadership. And into the scene came those willing to supply heroin together with the cheapest pot prices imaginable--freebooters like Bruce Brown, black sheep son of Liberty and David (producer of "Jaws") Brown. Bruce had the authority of a degree in Marxist economics, the prestige of a show on WBAI ("Psychomimetic Radio"), and instant access to the dealing world due to the theory (untrue) that his dad would pay off his dealing debts as a last resort. With his bag of tricks, he made the rounds at the VOICE, HIGH TIMES and the SOHO with the greatest of ease.

At first, he seemed a loyal friend. But gradually it became clear that to compen-sate for a feeling he was a mere academic without a genuine background as '60's organizer, he tended to disparage the self-discipline necessary for long-term accomplishment. Like all those who undermine freedom in the name of freedom, he instilled not genuine autonomy but self- destructive license, telling the kids the whole point of the revolution was to get as fucked up as possible. (Later he died of AIDS, after sharing needles with almost everyone he turned on to smack.)

The YIP organization at the time was a direct successor of the "new" YOUTH INTERNATIONAL PARTY formed December 1969 to replace SDS, by merging YIPPIE! and the WHITE PANTHERS. The Zippies had taken it over from Abbie and Jerry in '72-'73 on the strength of the WHITE PANTHER PARTY organizers in New York, Ohio and Wisconsin. As former Field Marshall of the W.P.P., Dana was one of four or five recognized YIP leaders in the '70's. Ultimately YIP derived its legiti-macy from the charter granted by the Oakland Black Panthers to John Sinclair.

Complicating matters, YIP (Zippie!) sympathized with the New York Panthers in their split with Oakland. So to the original White Panther dichotomy of life drugs (pot, psychedelics) versus death drugs (addictive white powders), the YIP-ster TIMES had added occasional articles all during the '70's on the movement against methadone, the use of accupuncture to treat addiction, and so-on. Pot was the only substance considered acceptable for heroin de-tox. They did not start a smoke-in movement seeking to legalize pot explicitely to separate it from hard drugs--they did not build Studio 10 to give this movement a place to get together weekly instead of semi-annually--to turn kids on to smack.

So when they discovered kids were coming in from all over the country for our Demcon protests, only to be turned on to heroin, they freaked. And in retrospect, introducing heroin (whose dose/tolerance curve, unless you have a $500-a-day, quickly leads from smoking to shooting) into a scene where passing the joint was a ritual (and without info on clean needles!) was the same as handing out smallpox- infected blankets along with the firewater. (This was actually done to the Sioux.)

Yet YIP itself had been fatally weakened when Forcade and Peter Bourne convinced them to make an exception for cocaine. So, a week after Carter's re-nomination, when a novice writer at the SOHO WEEKLY NEWS wrote a review (actually, positive) of an anti-Reagan comedy skit at Studio 10, instead of it seeming like the first step in breaking the media boycott, what grated was that they got Dana Beal mixed up with Dean Tuckerman. It seemed typical of a process where YIP would always be deliberately consigned to the blurry periphery of the picture instead of the focused foreground, "because they're only a bunch of publicity seekers."

Maybe it was the crash from coke done during the preceding week. Maybe it was just too much coffee and sugar. But all the frustration of watching the internal authority of the group ebb away so that he was powerless to stop the infiltration of heroin came to a head. Dana got on the phone to the SOHO, reached Paul Slansky, and demanded a correction.

Slansky said: "Write a letter, " and slammed the phone in Dana's right ear, the one with the painful earache.

Flashing on the fate of the never-publicized letter of protest against the "NOW HEROIN" issue, knowing for a fact that half the staff was "dabbling" and that Marsha Resnick was selling smack out of the back-alley door, some of which was reaching Studio 10....Dana picked up a firecracker (not a bomb as later reported by the SOHO WEEKLY NEWS, but a short M-80 called a "M-60"), hopped on his bike, and went peddling over to the SOHO WEEKLY NEWS, three blocks away.

On the way he met David, who offered to accompany him, and Alice Torbush, who told him it was the dumbest idea she'd ever heard. Disregarding her to his own detriment, he alighted on Broadway in front of the SOHO and had David hold his bike. He went inside and told the receptionist he wanted to talk to Paul Slansky. Slansky wouldn't come out; and sent word for him to get lost.

Dana took out a match, lit it, and held it to the firecracker. "You're not going to light that in here?!" said the horrified receptionist. "Oh yes, I am," said he. The fuse caught fire. Dana turned toward the door, and carelessly tossed it back over his shoulder.

As he was passing out through the door cubicle, he glanced back through the intervening glass panel to see the innocent niece of some honcho at TIME magazine (breaking her media teeth at the second most prestigious weekly in Manhattan) walk out from the back, just as the firecracker exploded next to a wastepaper basket.

The staff felt like they'd been bombed. The concussion stopped the clock on the back wall. It shut down production for the day. The niece (or maybe it was the daughter) of the TIME exec was cut by a teeny, tiny bit of paper wrap from the firecracker, giving rise to the canard, later disproved before a jury, that it was a schrapnel-bearing device.

And Dana was plunged into the deepest shit of his life. On the SOHO staff were good friends of Ed Koch. Charges were filed, which seemed especially unfair, coming just a month and a half after another set of junkies connected to the Sunset/Soho heroin scene had blown up the front door of 9 Bleecker with their own M-80, which detonated as Alice T. was anwering their knock. But as a rule Yippies don't file charges.

Dana bided his time and planned how to turn himself in with maximum public support. The next time that could be was Halloween. The rank-and-file from the smoke-ins was still supportive, but much of the core organization had rotted out, and fell away. In the end, the only crew that would organize a protest on Dana's behalf was Howard and Norma Lotsof.

[Richard_smoker]

CHAPTER 2: Howard Lotsof


A split had occurred between a small group in NewYork who knew of Ibogaine and had worked through its implications and the conventional wisdom, which held that the next logical step after legalizing pot was to legalize cocaine. To outsiders, starting work on Ibogaine a month before Reagan was inaugurated would have seemed like embracing a lost cause. It was only a little more than ten years since prestigious academics tried, and failed, to stop LSD prohibition. In fact, when asked about LSD by an inte rviewer in 1978, Keith Stroup of NORML said: "You want LSD, go talk to theYIPPIES."

But even as he was handing Lotsof the money, Dana remembered Leary had considerable success treating alcoholics and prisoners in the early '60s. And in a way, the decision to develop Ibogaine to fight addiction harkened back even further, to the 1950 's, and CIA experiments in psycho-pharmacologic warfare. Because they did experiment with Ibogaine, and they refuse to this day to release the results.

In March of 1955 Eisenhower's special assistant for Cold War Planning, Nelson Rockefeller, was briefed by Allen Dulles on all Covert CIA operations. The old Psychological Strategy Board of the National Security Council had been rechristened the Operat ions Coordinating Board, designed to shield the President from direct knowledge of CIA "crown jewels" including Operation Bluebird and MK-Ultra, notorious for dosing unsuspecting Army guinea pigs with psychedelics. The CIA was looking for, among other thi ngs, a substance that could be put in the water supply or sprayed in an aerosol over Moscow, which would cause loyal Soviet citi-zens to wake up in the morning as loyal Americans. You'd win without firing a shot. Unfortunately, they could never figure out a reliable delivery system, and they never found the right substance.

In 1955, as part of MK Ultra or Bluebird, Dr. Harris Isbell of the Federal Narcotic Hospital at Lexington, Kentucky, did try doses of up to 250 milligrams on eight, black, ex-morphine addicts. The catch was that they'd been clean for six months, and 250 milligrams is a sub-therapeutic dose, so the interruption of an active addiction wouldn't have occurred. Isbell was investigating the potential of indole-alkalamines to "mimic" psychosis--according to the"psycho-mimetic" model of the time.

Isabell letters.


We know all this because in the'80s CIBA-GIEGY released to Howard a letter (See left) from Isbell requesting the drug for thirteen more subjects. And because one of CIBA's own.researchers, named Schneider, discovered in 1956 that ibogaine potentiate s morphine analgesia (Ibogaine multiplies the painkilling effect of opiates), it is fairly certain Isbell checked it out further. Since Isbell was also looking for an addiction cure, and experimented with all different psychoactive agents in all different dose regimens, both during and after withdrawal from morphine, the next logical step would have been to try to wean active addicts off opiates by substituting progressively more Ibogaine for their usual dose of heroin. And if he used a threshold dose, 6 mill.-per-kg., he would have started observing the Lotsof effect.

Did the CIA or Defense Department discover Ibogaine's ability to interrupt addiction? They "refuse to confirm or deny" that any file exists (even CIBA-GIEGY's reply to Isbell, not only in the face of Lotsof's Freedom of Information requests, but even to NIDA researchers. New evidence has surfaced, however, that the Addiction Research Center at Lexington, Kentucky continued to be on the CIA payroll from 1957 to 1962--the years it would have taken them to check out Ibogaine and its probable impact. The record of payments (See exhibit on facing page and page 14, plus pgs. 16, 18 for CIA Office Codes and Abbreviations) with entries panning 1953 to 1961 (years during which Isbell was ARC director of research) came into our hands from one such frustrated source, minus any additional discriptions of the disbursements or results of experiments carried out.

If they did discover it, they didn't follow it up. In Africa, the ritual use of the plant of which Ibogaine is the principal alkaloid, Tabernanthe iboga, forms the basis of a religion called Bwiti. To become fully initiated, all Bwiti must eat enough iboga rootbark to induce intense visions and enable them to "meet their ancestors" -- including a kind of universal African ancestor (the Bwiti).
In Bwiti, An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination In Africa, Princeton University anthropologist James W. Fernandez recounts an unforgettable first encounter, soon after arriving in Gabon in 1958:

Late one evening about three months after I had taken up residence in Assok Ening... there was a loud knocking at the door... The open door revealed in the light of the pressure lamp a man of about 35 years with a beard, a long flowing robe, and a red cord around his waist. "Monsieur," he said addressing me in French, "I am Metogo Zogo, Nganga Bwiti, and I must speak with you." He fixed me with an unrelenting gaze. "You seek the truth here but you will not find it." As I stepped back, he made a dramatic entrance, sweeping himself and robes into the center of the room. "You do not know me but I am no stranger. I am a child of this village just returned from a long and spiritual journey. I have been following the truth! You will not find it in this village talking to these old men. You must come to the Bwiti chapel in my fathers house...
The Nganga could not contain himself... "You want to know the 'old things.' But none here know them. They have not seen them. We Banzie see them when we eat eboga. We see the 'old people' there. We know the 'old things' through them.
"Now you want to know why the condition of this village and of the Fang is desperate. None of this village except we Banzie can tell you that. The people here are lost in sin. They have not paid the price of those sins. They have not died for their sins. But we Banzie have died and paid the price. We die and return, die and return, each time more purified.
"You should dance with Bwiti. You have heard the harp at night. While all these villagers are asleep we dance and journey far. They go nowhere here. They wander around in confusion. They don't know where to go. But we go far." He took hold of the red-woven cord around his waist. "You see this cord? This is the Path of Birth and Death. We Follow this path. We know life. We know Death."

The red cord represents the umbilicus which connects each of us back, generation through generation to the original Mother. Initiates are advised that in the visions red is the color of the true road that leadsto the Ancestors. In some versions of Bwiti, the Creator God is properly accessed only through the Mother. Bwiti is the only native religion that has success fully resisted the inroads of Islam and Christianity. By giving the initiate access to a universal African ancestor (the Bwiti), it unified the Gabonese Independence movement of the '50s.

In the '50's, the United States was still in the thrall of segregation, of the racist police state of J. Edgar Hoover, nemesis of Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. The highest-level person briefed on MK Ultra results was Presidential assistant for Cold War Planning --Nelson Rockefeller or his suceessor--who equated African decolonialization with international communism. The last thing they wanted was a drug treatment which would, through the population of Black junkies, release another force that could unify and electrify the Black movement in this country.



When, at the beginning of the '60s, Tim Leary gave Allen Ginsburg acid, Ginsburg immediately flashed that an indole alkylamine of some kind could free the junkies, (although he was thinking more along the lines of substitute drugs.) But when the Harva rd Administration cracked down, Leary issued a call for his Great Leap Forward: for undergraduates everywhere to continue and broaden paraclinical research with all the indole-ring psychoactives, with one goal being to find a cure for addiction (See Leary-Ginsberg article, pgs 23-25 continued pgs. 36-38).

One of those who responded was a smart kid named Howard Lotsof. In those days it was possible to start your own chemical company with nothing more than a letterhead, and order all kinds of neat substances that were later controlled.

One day Howard was having breakfast with a chemist he knew who had been active in the small underground LSD scene of the '50s. The chemist offered him a dose of Ibogaine that he had in the freezer. Lotsof asked him what he could tell him about it. "Wel l, it's a thirty-six-hour trip," said the chemist.

A thirty-six-hour trip was the last thing Howard could imagine himself wanting to do, so he gave it to a friend and asked him to check it out. A month later,at 12:20 at night, Howard got a phone call from the friend, who said: "You know that drug you g ave me? It's not a drug, it's a food. We have to tell Congress!"

Howard was 19 at the time, living at home with his parents, so he said: "You woke my parents up. I'll get back to you." After succeeding in getting the house back to sleep, he decided the matter bore further investigation. It took his circle six months to get further supplies, and they still didn't know what they had.

To discover the interruption effect, you need active addicts, and you need enough experience with LSD to know sub-optimal doses of indole-alkalamines can produce a bum trip, where a larger dose gets you above the "tree-top" effect of getting tangled up in your own emotions. Only people seeking a high-dose, thirty-six-hour experience would do the amount--about a gram for a 150 pound person--that produces the therapeutic effect.

Contrary to some published reports, Howard did not hand the stuff out to some friends at a party. ("Some party," he says. "After the first hour it would consist of everyone lying around in a darkened room, not talking.") It was administered one dose at a time, over eight months, to a variety of friends, including Howard's future wife, Norma Alexander. Howard's own experience had the Freudian overtones of dreams, or of a birth visualization--

"The first thing I saw was a pulsating yellow screwdriver, which disappeared abruptly. And the next thing I knew I was walking up a ladder leading to a 10-foot diving board over a pool. As I was walking up the diving board, my bathing suit disappeared and I was naked. As I dived into the pool, my mother appeared beneath me with her legs open, and I was diving into her vagina. As I got closer, she changed into my sister, who changed into an infant. Then I went into the water, and that was it. The vis ion tuned into a new one."



"For three or four hours, the way the visualizations changed was always the same and different from any other hallucinogen. It appeared that you"d get one vision, and then a gold or silver web would carry it off and an entirely new set of visions woul d arrive."

On another trip, he was watching a stage, and all of a sudden music started. The music was like, BOMdidaBOMPdidaBOMdidaBOMP, and pairs of cavemen and cavewomen came dancing onto the stage. The men were behind the women, and they were dancing with them. And then two more of them came onto the stage,rolling this giant stone heart... Later he "had the sensation of slides opening up and him sliding downward at a tremendous speed, with all my experiences arranged, accessible like filing cabinets flashing past." He also experienced behavioral immobility, which wore off only when the visualizations ceased, leaving him in a strange, high energy state. Howard explains--

"The hallucinatory period ends abruptly, and the first reaction generally is, "What happened? I thought this was supposed the last for 36 hours." Then all of a sudden you realize that it hasn't stopped, it's just changed. You're no longer watching this motion picture, but there are like giant lightning flashes and movements of light all over the place...but there's no waviness, things do not lose their normal form, as they do under heavy dosages of common hallucinogens like LSD or mescaline, where a w all will seem to wave.

"Another difference was, with hallucinogens generally, if you were to move your hand you'd see a wave-like pattern. With ibogaine, you don't get a continuous wave, you get distinct images, and I noticed it the first time, when I was walking on the stre et...I was on my way to the west side, and I turned around, there were seven distinct after-images of myself. And as I took a step, a new one would appear, and the last one would disappear.

"During that second high-energy period, which lasts from six to twelve hours, you're seeing all these flashes of light and what's happening, is you're getting thoughts coming into your mind which support the deep symbolic material which came ou t in the initial three or four hour visualization phase. For instance you might be thinking that all people are playing roles, that the basic interaction of humans is on a sexual, nonverbal type of level. And that slowly diminishes, till after about twelv e hours that phase is completely closed out. Apparently a secondary stimulation effect occurs, and that slowly curtails, somewhere between twentyfour and thirty hours, and the subject goes to sleep."

Says Norma: "I remember thinking, when is this going to end? I'm so tired. I couldn't imagine anyone doing it for fun."



Strangest of all, Howard awoke after three hours of sleep completely refreshed. "Ten steps out of my door it hit me: For the first time in months, I did not want or need to go cop heroin. In fact, I viewed heroin as a drug that emulated death; I wante d life. I looked down the street, at the trees, the sky, my house and realized that for the first time in my life, I didn't feel afraid."

Five out of seven of the twenty in this initial trial were addicts who quit heroin or cocaine, involuntarily, for six months or longer, says Lotsof. And two days later, five of the seven had not gone through withdrawal, and had no desire to use hero in, for periods ranging up to eighteen months--up to six months from asingle treatment, and up to eighteen months from a series of five treatments.

The other two got up the next morning and began their routine of going out to cop junk. "Why?" Howard asked them.

"Because we're junkies," they said. "We like being junkies."

Howard was energized: "I don't know if you know anything about heroin addiction, but one of the people that it worked on was a roomate of the other two that it didn't work on. He was living with those guys for six months, while they were shooting up ev ery day, and he wasn't using it. Now, if you know anything about heroin addiction, you know how hard that is . So we knew we had something very unique here."

They sent a sample to Tim Leary, who didn't like it because it's not euphoric (no LSD mood swings, either). But Leary wasn't looking for treatments, but for something with a more universal, sacramental application; and he was tethered by his preferenc e for a user-friendly party drug, whose therapeutic potential was supposed to sneak up on millions without them noticing (See pgs. 23-25 , cont. 36-38).

Howard procured a big supply of Iboga root and sent it to a dope chemist he knew, who refused to do anything with it after producing a small initial sample. Howard had run up against what has become a familiar syndrome: Instead of seeing Ibogaine as a Godsend for junkies who want to withdraw painlessly, many people see it as an affront to the myth of the potency of the"hard stuff"--KING HEROIN. Or as Howard says: "Dealers were not interested in selling anything that would cause people to quit doing dru gs."

Through the years, though, the memory of one vision from his first Ibogaine experience resonated, and sustained him. At the end of the visions, he'd found himself in a darkened room, where a deep voice came to him, and said: "You will bring Ibogaine t o the world, and set it free."

In 1963, the FDA was beginning to investigate hallucinogens, and they realized his laboratory was ordering large amounts of hallucinogens for experimentation. Lotsof got a "visit" from the FDA enforcement unit responsible for tracking a shipment of 100 grams of mescaline, which had come in one or two days earlier and had already been disbursed.

There's the mescaline?" asked the two agents. At that time unauthorized use of mescaline on humans could only get you six months, but that was still enough to cause Howard to think fast: "It was used in rat experiments," he said.

"Where are the rats?" they asked. "They were destroyed in the course of the experiments," shot back Howard.

The agent eyed him for a moment, and said, "Good answer." It was, in fact, the only answer that could get him out of trouble. In the search of Howard's place, the agents unearthed two grams of the Ibogaine. "That's not mescaline, " he said. "It's Iboga ine. You can't take that." The agents' mouths formed an "O." They demanded to purchase the two grams as a sample and gave Lotsof a receipt. Now the feds knew he was involved in Ibogaine research. They cut off his supplies.of all controlled substances.

If that didn't make Howard a marked man, events in Berkeley, where Howard and Norma had relocated by 1964, certainly didn't endear him to the authorities. There they played a role in the FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT of Mario Savio, which erupted in September o f that year when the university administration sought to keep civil rights activists returning from the South from setting up the traditional literature tables on Sproul Plaza.

Howard modestly describes himself and Norma as bit players in the drama. But he tells the story of how someone smuggled a Bible into the local hoosegow, to the hundreds of kids being held after the takeover of Sproul Hall. A Bible soaked in LSD, whose pages were sacramentally consumed, thereby turning the Civil Rights Movement on to acid.

What Howard does say for attribution is this: "When the authorities realized their multi-million-dollar institution could be brought to a crashing halt with a few cents worth of chemicals, the decision was made to ban LSD."

It was the CIA's worst nightmare come true. One of their

pharmaco-warfare genies had escaped from the government labs to the underground. The communists had the Bomb, along with a mode of delivery we weren't willing to use.

In 1965, the Senate held hearings, and Congress passed a law that became effective at the beginning of 1966. It established felony sentences for trafficking in a whole range of psychedelics including LSD and mescaline. At the same time a wave of media hysteria was loosed upon the country, intended to reprogram the populace to forget about therapeutic benefits and think broken chromosomes and acid-heads staring into the sun until they go blind.

Curiously, Ibogaine was not on the list, but the feds cut extraordinary corne to nail Lotsof--much more so than if he was the inconsequential acid dealer they claimed.

Howard was the very first person raided when the law took effect. They were waiting for Howard and Norma at their place in Brooklyn when they came back from a trip to Philadelphia. It was a typical case where there are no drugs--only conspiracy charges based on the word of an informant, because the drugs are gone. More curious still, the conspiracy was supposed to have taken place nine months earlier...before the law had become effective.

All Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Morgenthau had was a flakey kid that Howard Lotsof had cut loose more than a year earlier, and who upon getting busted offered to give them... Lotsof. Howard was on some kind of priority list. His friends tried to ge t him the famous civil rights attorney Marvin Garbus,but that didn't work out. So with inadequate counsel, there came a point when the judge turned to Howard and said: "Mr. Lotsof, you claim to be a serious researcher. Name one thing you ever discovered."

"Well, your Honor, I discovered that Ibogaine can interrupt cocaine and her-oin addiction with a single dose." The judge slammed his gavel down and barked, "The jury will disregard that testimony!" and cleared the courtroom for the day.

With that one decision not to allow Lotsof to testify into the court record, Ibogaine development was set back two decades--sacrificed to insure that the first-ever prosecution under a popular new law would not be derailed. Trial proceed-ings ground on to their foregone conclusion: Howard was found guilty on 4 misdemeanors and sentenced to fourteen months

in federal prison.

Howard got the message: The U.S. certainly didn't want him around as an Ibogaine spokesman. He was in jail during the Summer of Love in 1967, when Dana got to know all the other local psychedelic luminaries. When Howard got out of prison in 1968, he w as shattered. He travelled to Nepal, where for the first time in five years, eating opium, he became re-addicted. When he tried to find some Ibogaine to de-tox, in 1969, it was completely unavailable.

In 1968, State Police under Gov. Nelson Rockefeller informed the feds Ibogaine was being used to cut heroin in the Syracuse area. (Curiously, Syracuse was a Rockefeller stronghold). Ibogaine soon became Schedule I, like LSD and heroin. Meanwhile, Rock efeller was busy engineering acceptability of his anti-crime brain-child, named Adolphine by it's Nazi inventors--re-named "methadone" by its patent-holder, Rockefeller University.

Returning to New York, he and Norma enrolled in a methadone program, and got into NewYork University film school. But methadone withdrawal lasts about eight to ten times longer than kicking junk. It lingers in the tissues. The very long-acting quality that makes it socially preferable to smack ~(the addict doesn't have to do up every four hours, so he can hold down a job) makes it a prison without walls. Addicts call it "the orange handcuffs." Still, Lotsof had one unique advantage over the average add ict, who literally doesn't remember what it's like to be off drugs. From Ibogaine, Howard remembered that somewhere, the trap had an exit. Graually, laboriously, 5 milligrams at a time (since methadone cold turkey can kill), he and Norma de-toxed themselv es. On his own Howard invented what is today the only standard method for methadone de-tox: several months of Hell.

A big factor in subsequent negative attitudes toward methadone later, among the initial supporters of the Ibogaine Project, came from Norma and Howard's recounting their difficulties in getting off of it. They were just finishing getting off methadon e in December 1973, when they were introduced to Dana Beal by a friend of pot guru Ed Rosenthal.

As final survivors of the psychedelic movement, they hit it off from the start. Soon Dana was making regular morning runs on the D train to hang out at their place in Brooklyn near Pratt Art School. One morning in early 1974, in the period of the gas l ines after the first OPEC price hike, they were discussing which drug was "most psychedelic." Howard said it had to be Ibogaine.

"What's it like?" asked Dana. "Kind of like harmaline," said Howard. "Oh, you mean telepathine," said Dana, regurgitating the only thing (its synonym) he knew about harmaline.

"Yeah," said Howard. "But you know what? It stopped my heroin

addiction."

The effect on Dana wasn't like a blinding flash of light--more like a bell going off. As the putative new leader of the YIPPIES, Dana was poking through the wreckage of the movement for anything that could be an asset. He filed this interesting fact aw ay among the YIP crown jewels.

During the next six years, as they collaborated on a number of projects, including three films, Howard gradually regained the confidence he would need to become Ibogaine's spokesman. But to this day, Norma Alexander, a brilliant Afro-American woman who is chief financial officer of NDA International, refuses to go on camera as a spokesperson. She's still paranoid from the '66 bust--and from being Black in America.

Rockefeller capped off his successful installation of methadone maintenancewith the toughest drug law in the country, named in his honor and used to incarcerate a substantial and growing minority of young, black men.e one thing you ever discovered."

Last updated February 6, 1995

[Richard_smoker]

Chapter 3: Dhoruba Moore

Sitting together in early 1974, Dana and the Lotsofs were not the first people to realize methadone has serious problems. Today Ron Fogel works on Ibogaine, but he happens to be one of the with Dr. Robert DuPont. He says they knew it had serious liver and kidney toxicities almost from the beginning, but that Nixon and Rockefeller (Rockefell er University owned the patent) were hell-bent on solving the rising crime rate. To serious concerns among early researchers, the word on the street soon added that it can rot your bones, make your teeth fall out, and cause ballooning of your joints.

(To be fair, many people tolerate it. Lotsof credits it with getting him off the street so he could put his life back together. But not all opposition is based, as proponents think, on moralistic objections against any addictive drug.)

In 1968-9, the Black Panthers initiated a whole movement in the Bronx that seized Lincoln Hospital Methadone Detox, the pilot project for New York City and the country. They agitated, picketed and, after shutting it down, occupied it. Then they re-open ed it as Lincoln Drug-Free Detox, using non-Western techniques such as acupuncture and "Social" re-education through the ideology of the Black Panther Party. Only much later would it become clear that one of the longest-lasting impacts of the Panthers was in this area--that a section of the B.P.P. in fact survived, minus guns, in the movement of black acupuncturists.

The New York Panthers were never as well known outside the city as the Oakland bunch, who as the Central Committee controlled the party paper and so on. The image that really made it out to white radicals across the country was this Myth of Black Pan thers waging a war against police-controlled heroin dealing in Harlem. It was all publicized during the three trials of Dhoruba Bin Wahad (then known as Dhoruba Moore) in the early seventies. His story left a lasting impression amongst the YIPs.

Born Richard Moore, Dhoruba grew up in the Southeast Bronx in the '50s, which he describes as a "time warp for Black people, who had not yet fully begun to struggle for their liberation." His father was a heroin addict. He was raised by his mother, m ostly. As a teenager, he joined a gang, but because of his father he never dealt anything but marijuana (and, later, a bit of acid).

In 1962, he was sent to prison for five years for what he describes as "an act of self-defense." In prison he sharpened his mind with the works of various Black and revolutionary writers. His comrades gave him the name "Dhoruba," which is Swahili for " He who is born in the storm." He was released in 1967, into the Vietnam protest era.

Wanting to become an artist, he began to frequent the East Village. He had an apartment on East Third Street across from a jazz bar called Slug's. It was the Summer of Love, but there is no indication that he attended happenings in nearby Tompkins Squ are Park.

He became politically active only after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, April 4, 1968. With the assassination of King, young Blacks everywhere felt that non-violence was not enough--that they had to make things happen faster. Black Panther chapters popped up like mushrooms. Dhoruba decided to go by the Harlem office and check them out.

Belying the guns and black leather, nine-tenths of the Panther program consisted of organizing rent strikes, community health clinics and free breakfasts for school children (liberally mixed with Black Consciousness education), as well as campaigning against hard drugs. This last included both harassing local dealers and, as mentioned, the ground-breaking takeover of Lincoln Detox. Introducing accupuncture or T'ai Chi was a logical extension of the community health focus and the Maoist ideology of t he Panthers. (It's said the Oakland Panthers just sold the LITTLE RED BOOK, the NewYork Panthers actually read it.) But taking on the feds' pet treatment initiative was enough to get them in a peck of trouble, even if the New York red squad and J. Edgar H oover hadn't had COINTELPRO (the Counter-Intelligence Program) to physically eliminate the Black Revolution. In a memo issued just forty days before the shooting of King, J. Edgar Hoover directed all agents to "prevent the rise of a Messiah" who could u nify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement.

The New York Police Department red squad (BOSS--Bureau of Special Interests) had infiltrated spies into the Panthers from the beginning. In the spring of 1969 they made their move. Based on the actions of provocateurs in their ranks, twenty-one leading New York Panthers were indicted en masse on conspiracy charges of plotting to assassinate various public officials, blow up the subways, the Bronx Botanical Gardens, commit kidnappings, and so on.

The trial dragged on for more than a year, the longest and most expensive in New York history. In early 1970 Abbie Hoffman donated his $20,000 advance from STEAL THIS BOOK, enough for bond to bail out two of the twenty-one. After joint consultations t he twenty-one elected Dhoruba and Michael Tabor, who were the best public speakers, to represent them on the outside. In the next ten months Dhoruba displayed the kind of leadership that was only bound to get him in more trouble.

Taking a leaf from their successful elimination of Malcolm X, COINTELPRO next planted letters warning that Dhoruba intended to assassinate Huey Newton. They knew New York was supporting Cleaver in his dispute with the rest of the Oakland central commit tee. A couple people had already been shot in this feud. When Dhoruba got word he was next, he went underground; there was no choice. He and Michael Tabor were immediately denounced as "enemies of the people" on the front page of THE BLACK PANTHER. The C entral Committee said he did it to sabotage the defense of the twenty -one. He was accused of ripping off defense monies.

The response of his faction was to escalate the struggle in the most creative way. NBC video footage still exists of heavily armed New York Panthers raiding a major Harlem dope distributor, dumping quarter-pounds of heroin into the gutter in the rain , to be washed away.

It was wildly popular with the Black Community. Even before he and Dhoruba were released on bail, Michael Tabor had published "Capitalism Plus Dope Equals Genocide" through the BPP, denouncing

"the plague, poisonous, lethal...sold....to Black youths who are desparately seeking a kick, a high...anything that will help make them oblivious to the squalor, to the abject poverty, disease and degradation that engulfs them in their daily existence. ...By weakening , dividing and destroying us, [the plague reinforces] the strength of the oppressor enabling him to perpetuate his dominion over us.

"It is also the practice of...narcotics agents to seize a quantity of drugs from one dealer, arrest him, but only turn in a portion of the confiscated drugs for evidence. The rest is given to another dealer who sells it and gives a percentage of the p rofits to the narcotics agents. ...In return for information, [informers who are dealers] receive immunity from arrest. The police cannot solve the problem, for they are part of the problem."

Tabor turned out to be right on--prescient even. Things had gotten so far out of control, you see, that the police themselves were about to be busted, by the Feds. For all intents and purposes, the smack Panthers were dumping in the gutter belonge d to the NYPD.

It's all a matter of public record, thanks to the KNAPP Commission: how the heroin from the French Connection bust, the biggest haul in U.S. history, had been systematically spirited out of police evidence lockers downtown, replaced with flour, and sol d on the streets of Harlem. And that scam, which brought down the whole house of cards, was only tip of the iceberg.

New York was unique, because half the junkies in America lived in its five boroughs. All five Mafia families were represented in New York. According to Alfred McCoy's THE POLITICS OF HEROIN IN SOUTHEAST ASIA, the Cosa Nostra had by then established ne w connections in Southeast Asia under the cover of the Viet Nam war, bypassing the now-too-well-known Turkish connection. And as documented by the Knapp Commission, the entire NYPD central narcotic squad (Special Investigations Unit-SIU) was working hand in glove with the five families, selling protection and dealing drugs. For the interlocking directorate of the CIA/SIU/Cosa Nostra, that French Connection heroin was only a tiny bit of a constant flow that kept a quarter million New York addicts in schma goo.

But that particular house of cards would not come crashing down until Nixon's second term--too late to do much good for Dhoruba and the Panthers. Dhoruba was already on the lam when word came out that the twenty-one had beat their charges. In early Ma y, 1971, the entire case was thrown out by the jury, a humiliating defeat for the criminal justice system.

For Panthers staffing the Harlem office, waiting for the next move by the police, mere vindication by a jury was like the taste of ashes in their mouths. They might tweak the NYPD by expropriating police drug money and giving it away as breakfasts for school children, but that was a scant substitute for the ability to raise funds via mass organizing, which now seemed certain to expose them only to new conspiracy charges, or death.

Chicago police had assassinated Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in a fusillade of bullets as they lay sleeping. Cops in Los Angeles laid siege to the Panther head-quarters there and shut it down. For the New York Panthers, the waiting became unbearable. Ma ny of them decided to stay one step ahead of the law, to join Dhoruba underground.

A new organization was formed, the Black Liberation Army. Jettisoning the community programs, they waged an armed struggle against the police, which of course they were bound to lose. The last black guerrilla was wiped out by 1975. You can't win agains t atom bombs with a machine gun.

The very first action of the BLA freaked out the cops, though. Someone machine-gunned two cops guarding D.A. Hogan's house--didn't kill them, but ruined them for life. A few days later, two more cops were shot, dead. Now financially dependent on exprop riating smack dealers, the underground continued the campaign of taking the money, destroying the dope, "punishing" the dealers. At a place called the TRIPLE-O social club in the Bronx, an after-hours club catering to dealers and their girlfriends, Dhorub a was caught. Somehow this dope den had pretty incredible police protection. He had just lined the patrons up against the wall, stripped them naked and was collecting their valuables, when the look-out came running upstairs and told Dhoruba the street was full of cops.

A day or so after the bust, a machine gun found at the scene was linked to the shooting of the two cops guarding D. A. Hogan. One of the patrons of the "Triple O" was trying to become a corrections officer; he was persuaded to tie Dhoruba to the mach ine gun. (Ballistics also matched the shooting to another gun later seized in California, but that was not disclosed for many years.) A fingerprint taken from a copy of the NEW YORK POST wrapped around the communique from the Hogan action was matched wi th Dhoruba's. (Unfortunately, it "had to be destroyed" to get it off the newsprint.)

The chief government witness was Pauline Josephs, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who was on medication for that. Her first statement to the police was that they'd gotten the wrong man, because Dhoruba had been at her place until 9 P.M. The shooting was at 9:08 PM--too soon for anyone to drive from the Bronx to Manhattan. But by holding her in protective custody for almost a year, the D.A.'s men cooked her testimony until they got it just right.

Nonetheless, there were so many inconsistencies when she got on the stand that the first jury refused to convict, as did a second jury. Finally, during trial three, Dhoruba snapped, rose from the defense table and said, "I'm not going to listen any mor e to that lying bitch!" The display of temper alienated the jury. It took just forty-five minutes for them to convict a man who had gone in four years from ex-con to contender for the mantle of Malcolm X.

Nineteen years for a crime he didn't commit. For nineteen years he took whatever they threw at him and absorbed it, transformed it. By the end he saw that the problem wasn't just radicals being held political prisoner, but the 40 per cent of all bla ck males in N.Y.C., enmeshed in jail, prison, the courts, or some other phase of the System. In a letter to his wife Tanaquil, dated September 7, 1989, he wrote:

"I'm tired of being tired, and winters are the loneliest and worst times in prison. I remember the feeling of being "up north" in Clinton or Attica during the winter, so far away from the source of any care or love or warmth--not that anybody really lo ved me during those harsh, bitter times. In Clinton--it's on a mountain--it was so cold your hair would freeze, and the long, heated corridors of that dismal place made you feel like you were underground.

"Clinton county is one of the poorest in the state, so it's always getting a new prison. It's major growth industry is the traffic in Black and Latino flesh..."

The new Involuntary Servitude.

The major, unintended side effect of putting Dhoruba on ice was that he survived to do something about it, while the BLA went down in flames, and even whites in the wing of the movement that practiced armed struggle were finished off in 1981 , in Rockland, New York, in the Brink's job.

Dhoruba was freed in February 1990, due to the diligence of his attorneys (and his own diligence) in combing through 35 0,000 pages of FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, which proved conclusively that he had been framed.

The narcs who sold the French Connection heroin in Harlem went down well. Ninety-seven out of 100 members of the SIU resigned in disgrace, were convicted, or committed suicide.

When the U.S. later invaded Panama to snag Noriega, President Bush propound ed an interesting doctrine, that whenever a government is so riddled with corruption, from to bottom, the people have a right to rebel.

Much of the rest of the Panther serve-the-people program survived, shorn of armed struggle, in community-based movements of the'70s and '80s like the Black accupuncturists. In fact, YIPSTER TIMES, in 1977, ran a story about the mysterious death of the head of Lincoln Detox only hours before he was to meet Carter Drug Czar Peter Bourne. The Editor who solicited the story, Bob Sisko, attributed it to followers of Lyndon LaRouche, who were vying to take the program over from ex-Panthers. In the fall-out, Dr. Michael Smith became the head of Lincoln Detox.

Later, Smith would confirm to writer Dennis King that a LaRouche supporter on staff at Lincoln had been feeding info on the Panthers to the New York Police Department. A public campaign emerged against the nest of radicals and Black Panthers at Lincoln Detox. As Ed Koch swept into office as Mayor of New York City, on a platform of cutting all city funding of drug treatment--a shortfall the State of New York was supposed to pick up, but never did--then-State Senator Charles Schumer and other questioned why any government funds at all were going to programs that promoted Black history and community activism as part of treatment.

Mutulu Shakur and the Panthers who had occupied Lincoln Detox without a break for almost 10 years were lured to downtown Manhattan, to a meeting that was supposed to decide their fate. When they returned to the Bronx, they found Lincoln Detox occupied by 500 police.

All the radicals refused to accept the new regime, so they automatically didn't get their jobs back. Michael Smith decided to stay for the sake of some kind of continuity.

As for the LaRouchoids, after riding the National Anti-Drug Coalition (NADC) to mass-movement status in '76 and '77, LaRouche was denounced in '78 by then Black Muslim leader Wallace Muhammed, who called him "hateful." NCLC propaganda (Queen of England dealing dope and all) turned out to be carelessly borrowed whole cloth from the rantings of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, with anti-Semitic references too bold even for the Black Muslims. But perhaps in return for ratting out Lincoln Detox, cooperation and support was unimpeded at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), in the person of Dr. Thomas Gleaton and the "parents' groups" (including Sue Rusche of suburban Atlanta and Otto Moulton of Massachusetts) that NIDA had put together to publicize the anti-marijuana pseudo-science of one Gabriel Nahas.

In interviews much later with Dennis King, the name that LaRouche defectors linked to the eviction of the Panthers from Lincoln Detox was Dr. Ned Rosinsky. With the Black movement against heroin neutralized, the Nahas group had no problem working closely with Dr. Rosinsky and LaRouche's "War on Drugs" Organization well into the '80's. They incorporated key LaRouche tenets into their "drug prevention" message, e.g., confounding addictive and non-addictive druts, and the attitude that any drug-induced experience constituted a theft from Society. They also co-sponsored conferences at NYU in '79 and Columbia in '80, featuring supposed findings of Nahas (the student of the Nazi Stringaris) first presented in 1978 at the University of Rheims, his alma mater.

Mutulu Shakur moved to Harlem and started BAANA--the Black Acupuncturists Association of North America--only to be caught up on the Brinks fiasco in Nyack, New York. BAANA fell apart when Mutulu and others drew long prison sentences. Acupuncture itself became politically suspect. Those were the years that LaRouche "Executive Intelligence" personnel had twice-weekly access to the White House--years when marijuana arrests returned from 25% under Carter to the 50/50 parity with hard drug busts that had existed under Nixon. It took the crack epidemic of 1985-86 to get the public to wake up--and to rehabilitate acupuncture as well, since nothing else seemed to work for crack.

On August 22, 1989, Huey Newton was shot dead by a drug dealer who was tired of being shaken down for donations to Huey's crack habit. Ironically, Bobby Seale had been informed of Ibogaine earlier that year. But by May of 1989, Seale no longer had much to do with Newton, who apparently was hard to deal with on coke.

Six months later, Dhoruba was released on a showing of gross prosecutorial misconduct during his trial. That day, Dana Beal walked across town to the house of his lawyer, William Kunstler, who was also one of Dhoruba's lawyers. Dana found Dhoruba relaxing with his wife, Tanaquil Jones, on the second floor, and presented him with a summary of information on Ibogaine. So that he would never again need to confront the armed might of the State with a machine gun, just to fight heroin.

Shunned by the BPP Oakland leadership, with no bail money, Geronimo Pratt was convicted in 1972 of a 1968 murder, despite FBI wiretap logs showing he was 400 miles away at the time; he languishes to this day, with Leonard Peltier and 250 other internationally recognized American political prisonsers, victims of a COINTELPRO that never ended.

Last updated February 6, 1995

[Richard_smoker]

CHAPTER 4: Dana Beal


As Dhoruba said a few months later just before he embraced Nelson Mandela at 125th Street in Harlem, every movement needs a "symbol" to inspire it. The final unintended side effect of all those trials, all that political agitation by Dhoruba's supporte rs, was that a single television image did escape from NewYork, even into the jail where Dana was sitting in Madison, Wisconsin: Black Panthers had tried to drive heroin out of Harlem with guns.

Dana was born in the same hospital in Ravenna, Ohio, where the dying students were later taken from Kent State. He counts among his formative experiences shaking hands with Jack Kennedy when he campaigned in East Lansing in 1960, and hitch-hiking in August '63, at 16, to Washington, D.C. , in order to be near the foot of the Lincoln Memorial for the "I have a dream" speech. Two months later he organized his first demonstration of 2,000 people, in Lansing, when the Klan blew up four little Bla ck girls in a church on Birmingham Sunday.

The next year he did a brief stint in a state mental hospital because of his mercurial temper. Because he told shrinks he thought he was destined for something important, they said he was crazy. But that kept him from being drafted in January '65, a m onth with the highest proportion of casualties in Viet Nam. He also became a lifelong critic of thorazine and prolyxin. He escaped, got a job in New York, saved his money, and legalized his status in late 1965.

On Christmas Day, 1966, after studying epistemology and metaphysics, he tried LSD for the first time. His reaction: Kant was right, it's all phenomena. But after the first few times (including one session with a friendly psychologist who helped him plumb distressing episodes of his early childhood), he found that more and more of the acid had a speed base such as ritalin to gettwice as many hits out of a gram--thereby demonstrating the flaws of an underground market. People were no longer getting a genuine LSD effect. Reinforced by speed, the ego-structures wouldn't let go.

Because of the furious controversy surrounding CIA sponsorship or involvement in psychedelics, speculation was rife that all this was deliberate--part of a program to keep the psychedelic revolution under control. When Dana got real LSD again, he had a vision:

"I flashed that all of us in the psychedelic movement were like voluntary guinea pigs in some kind of CIA experiment that had gotten out of control. The White Light was flashing across us like searchlights on a World War I no-man's land. All around me, we were taking casualties. But some of us would make it to the other side; and someone would bring back something wonderful."

He decided the first battle should be for the least threatening, most popular drug: marijuana. Inspired by a VOICE article on the Dutch Provos, he started the New York Provos with two friends, and called a smoke-in for Tompkins Square Park. The smoke-ins got bigger and bigger, and after a judge ruled a roll-your-own cigarette seen from a distance wasn't grounds for arrest, the Feds moved in an informer who wheedled Dana's personal acid stash out of him. When he was busted in late August of 1967, 3,000 people marched from a Fugs concert, across Fourteenth Street, to the federal holding pen on West Street. It was Dana's first fifteen minutes of fame.

In October the Provos gave out four pounds of pot at the "Levitation of the Pentagon." Then in December, the Provo Free Store on First Street was raided, and Dana was charged with a pot sale he didn't do. Convinced he couldn't get fair treatment, he fl ed to Mexico, then Canada, where he had to watch Chicago '68 on television.

One day, sitting in a Vancouver community center, he read an ESQUIRE article on the early psychedelic movement by Tim Leary and Allen Ginsburg. What stuck in his mind, for years, was a passage about using psychedelics to cure heroin addiction. (Of course, LSD doesn't stop withdrawal symptoms. If every junkie could kick with five dollars worth of acid, they'd do just that every time they wanted to cut back on their habits and start over. Ginsberg was thinking of it more as a substitute; he writes Leary that Burroughs said that it would only make withdrawals worse.) [See p. 37].

In April of '69, Dana filtered back into the United States on a Canadian ID, where he came to rest in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Unable to stay away from organizing for long, he became involved with the White Panthers, and , in a psychedelic manifesto (" Right on, Culture Freaks"), expanded on William Burrough's insight that all forms of social control resemble addiction because the same "backbrain" reflex component involved in addiction underlies everyday work routine.

In September Dana travelled to Ann Arbor, where he was appointed Field Marshall of the WPP, based on his reputation from New York. That didn't last after the White Panther Party and YIPPIE merged in December. (The Ann Arb or folks were really organizing to get John Sinclair out of ten years in prison for two joints.)

When, in the aftermath of Kent State, Abbie, Jerry and the Ann Arbor crew cancelled the first D.C. July 4 smoke-in, Dana got Rennie Davis to call it back on. Nixon, emboldened by reports of hard hats beating up peaceniks in NYC, had called his supporte rs to Washington for a July 4th "Honor America Day." The smoke-in wound up with three times as many people as Nixon, and when Billy Graham saw 4,000 protesters marching up the Reflecting Pool in a spontaneous act of self-baptism, he stopped his sermon.

It took the 1971 July 4 smoke-in, though, where Beal and Forcade added a march against CIA/Vietnam heroin (and which got airplay on CBS Evening News) to motivate the authorities to snag Beal on his old warrant. Ten days later he was busted in Madison, Wisconsin. In September, 2,000 people held a smoke-in outside the jail, and Dana got his second fifteen minutes of fame.

Dana was not freed of his legal entanglements until five days before the '72 Demcon. But he reached Miami in time to walk into the vicious split between the Yippies (Abbie, Jerry) and the Zippies (Forcade and the ex-White Panthers, minus Ann Arbor, who 'd faded out since Sinclair was released). There, when McGovern sought to soften his stance against the war on the morning of his nomination, Beal was one of the leaders of the Zippies/SDS takeover of the lobby of the candidate's campaign headquarters, at the Doral Hotel.

He fired the imagination of the counterculture by catching McGovern, hours before he was nominated, on live prime time, with a trick question. First he got McGovern to confirm the CIA and the Saigon regime were deeply involved in pipelining heroin into the U.S. from Vietnam. Then he asked the follow-up: "How can we protect 26 million Americans who smoke pot from all this heroin unless we 'control' pot like alcohol, by legalizing it and selling it over the counter?"

McGovern ducked the question!

For democrats, including Abbie's people who were wooing the democrats, this was more like fifteen minutes of infamy than fifteen minutes of fame. Never mind it was the first mass media confirmation that hard drugs had fatally corrupted the U.S. Intelli gence Community--a view that had become conventional wisdom by the mid-'80s. Beal made McGovern look bad, on television. For a long time after that, everything he did after that had to draw its support from the street people. Twenty-five years later, he's still blackballed in some quarters, because of that five-minute exchange.

Then, a year later, Abbie was busted selling three kilos of cocaine. When he went underground, the zippie wing took over. They did lots of things besides smoke-ins, most notably publicizing the pictures of Hunt and Sturgis in the grassy knoll--i.e., th e theory that a CIA/Mafia conspiracy coordinated by Richard Nixon killed Kennedy.* (At the end of the decade, YIPster TIMES staffers even worked closely with the House Committee on Assassinations, which concluded there had been a second gun.)

In reaction to the leadership style of Abbie and Jerry, Yippies were almost more concerned about their own faithful internal practice of formal democracy than what was happening in Washington, D.C. In July, 1974, as the Impeachment of Nixon unfolded, Dana spent weeks preparing a second issue with better comparison fotos of the tramps and Hunt and Sturgis, with story attached revealing for the first time of Nixon's presence in Dallas until just hours before the assassination. Then he got on a plane to Washington--Washington state, where YIPs were having a conference at Spokane. On the plane he sat next to the only woman who looked aguely hip and showed her "House to Probe Nixon Death Squad."

She surprised Dana by not only knowing of the story , but adding information with a personal twist---the focus of the conspiracy that killed JFK was a cell of high-level drug dealers in the Coast Guard, Customs, and the Office of Naval Intelligence. They were centered on Long Island and in Philadelphia. They could never be busted because the Navy, conveniently, was in charge of investigating itself. Their only Achilles heal was that people on the inside had access to huge quantities of dope, and sometimes became strung out. She herself was the daughter of an officer in the Navy or Coast Guard, and she was being shipped out to Spokane to dry out because she'd become totally addicted. Dana urged her to come to the conference, to tell her story to the other YIPs, but she was met at the airport and whisked away.

At the time Dana discounted her story, but years later, after seeing the autopsy scene in movie JFK, it came flooding back. It was very much on his mind, just two weeks before Nixon resigned, when everyone at the Spokane conference did ALD-52 (5-acet yl-LSD, which was represented to them as "LSD put through an additional step of purification") in a Provo-style attempt to "get everyone on the same trip."

Robert Goutarel, the father of Ibogaine research, says indole-alkalamines of the LSD series are fundamentally different from the iboga-harmala group--"clear and angelic" as opposed to oneiric (REM-generating). Nonetheless ALD-52 turned out to be ten or twenty times more psychedelic than LSD. That is, its effects lay far more in the direction of Ibogaine than a mere "fishbowl effect," the "apprehension of the oneness of experience" often referred to as "seeing God."

Philip K. Dick, writing about his own celebrated religious or Near-Death Experience (NDE) in early 1974, described the phenomena of "laminate personality," of being several personalities millennia apart at the same time. Aron Kay, who took the ALD also, confirms that he had flashes of the same thing, the definite sensation of co-existing at several points of time simultaneously: 2,000 years ago, in the present, and some time up ahead in the future. It was Beal's second vision:

"As we came down to the river," says Dana, "it was like this other personality was in my mind with me, a dominant personality, who looked at the water, saw the twentieth-century pollution, and thought: `The water in this river is totally unacceptable f or performing Baptisms.' And this other person was kind of daydreaming, not even conscious of the me there, until I looked at the litter along the streambank and thought--`But of course, they didn't have non-biodegradable plastics back then.'--and the other personality kind of noticed I was there, and who I was, and thought: `Oh, a Baptist (I had attended Baptist Sunday School)...well, just make sure you don't get your head cut off this time!'"

After puzzling it out ("Who was that masked man?"), Dana decided this meant he was supposed to avoid taking any unnecessary risks, until his mission, up in the unknowable future, was accomplished. Aron says they sat looking at that river for ho urs.

Dana consulted with Lotsof when he got back to New York. "Ibogaine was more psychedelic than that?"

"On Ibogaine, you would have visualized the other personality as sitting there talking to you," was Howard's cryptic reply.

The ALD affected the others who took it, Ben Masel, etc., similarly; it changed the political trajectory of YIP's inner core. Right up to the Brink's job fiasco in'81, various fringe elements continued to fall for the idea that membership in some kind of secret armed underground vanguard was hipper than a mass movement utilizing weapons of information and consciousness. In 1974, romantic attachment to the S.L.A. (the Symbionese Liberation Army, which kidnapped Patty Hearst and whose leader, Donald DeFr eeze, was probably a police provocateur) had seriously competed among the YIPS with the less glamorous organizing around Nixon's impeachment. After Spokane that was never a problem.

Within three years the new generation of YIP leaders like Ben Masel had gotten into TAI CHI, the"passive" martial arts form based on throwing blocks, not striking blows--and on just not being in the way of your opponents' blows. Typical of the time was the Yippie action the day after Carter's inauguration, chaining themselves to the White House fence to draw attention to several hundred Nixon-era political prisoners still being held long after COINTELPRO was discredited. They were arrested. And Carter never extended his amnesty from draft dodgers to political prisoners--hundreds, including Dhoruba, continued to sit in captivity.

The YIPs really didn't care if they were blacklisted in some circles, or dismissed as "the marijuana movement," beecause HIGH TIMES was opening up access to millions of people. By July 4, 1977, they could assemble the same number of people in front of the White House--10,000--as laid seige to Chicago in '68. All from a series of ads in HIGH TIMES. In early 1978, YIPPIE published the SOFT STRATEGY, a major course-correction. You could say it was based on the TAI CHI concept "soft on the outside, hard on the inside"--but what predisposed them to getting into TAI CHI in the first place?

Instead of the knock 'em, sock 'em, blow 'em up approach of the Weather Underground, they turned to the tough, self-disciplined task of maintaining a more ingratiating exterior while digging in for the long run. They even tried to make peace with the o ther wing of the Yippies, earning Abbie's personal gratitude with the Felt Forum benefit, although not all Abbie's people wanted to be friends.

When racial fighting dogged New York smoke-ins, it was only a hop, skip and a jump to start ROCK AGAINST RACISM. And RAR was something Howard and his Afro-American wife Norma Alexander could comfortably join. A veterans of the Free Speech Movement, the y'd always been a little too grown-up for the Yippies.

The stage was set. In the early '60s, when Howard tried to initiate an Ibogaine Project without a support structure in place, it came to nothing. It was like an egg fertilized at the wrong time, coming down the fallopian tube and finding the womb is not ready for it.

This time Howard had the support of his personal network as well as Dana, OVERTHROW, RAR, and the activist YIPPIE wing of the marijuana movement in practically every state of the Union. And somewhat in reaction to Abbie's people siding with the SOHO WEEKLY NEWS, the younger generation of YIPS took a turn toward a more closed decision-making process, making it very hard to unseat the project once it got going.

In December 1980, Dana Beal was mad as hell, and he wasn't going to take it anymore. He was willing to "pay any price, bear any burden" to win the war against addiction--including use of psychopharmaco-chemical weapons from the CIA's closet.

But there 's a post script:

In September '81, Dana was acquitted of felony assault at the SOHO WEEKLY NEWS after the judge ruled it was a firecracker, not a bomb, and the jury convicted him of recklessness, a misdemeanor which netted him thirty-five days on Riker'sIsland.

While he was waiting to be sentenced, Dana and Alice Torbush attended one of the first showings of PRINCE OF THE CITY (much of which was shot a few blocks away from 9 Bleecker on Mulberry Street). It's the story of Danny Ciello, the narc who narked out the SIU (NYPD Central Narcotics Unit) in the early '70s. The story had two morals:

1.) Even if police were 100 percent incorruptible, heroin can't be wiped out, because to penetrate above the street level, agents must either deal it themselves or maintain a number of dealers as informers. But that gives a crucial edge to dealers with police connections; soon they dominate the trade. Organized crime consists of dealers who can buy a cop, an ADA, a judge, or secure protection from the federal intelligence community.

Cops themselves are damaged by this; in the movie Danny Ciello is moved to act because his own brother, strung out on smack (the methadone is not working), begs him for a connection. That night he returns to Manhattan to supply one of his own snitches after the smack he gave him earlier turns out to be bogus. So he has to go out in the rainy night, to rip off another junkie to take care of his informant.

2.) Drugs are impossible to prohibit, but police will not give up drug prohibition because junkie snitches are their eyes and ears in the community. Without snitches, they lose control. Moreover, by fostering constant rip-offs, addiction breaks down so lidarity, breeds paranoia, saps the community's potential for social revolution. The Panthers were on to something, all right.

But if Black Panthers couldn't stop heroin with machine guns, neighborhood support, and no need for search warrants, neither can the police with all the prisons, armed might and sophisticated technology of the State. (Nor can there be redress through t he courts, as shown later in the '80s when the Christic Institute tried to sue elements of the Intelligence Community for bringing 500 tons of cocaine into the country to fund the contras. The federal judge finedthem $1.2 million for general chutzpah.)

As Dana and Alice left the theatre, another layer of reality fell into place:Fighting addiction with a War on Drugs is worse than useless. It's misleading.

What we need is a cure, not a war.

Under Reagan, we got the war, not the cure. As the war dragged on, the proponents of the Dutch harm reduction approach were officially despised, their advice relegated to the sidelines of public discourse. Only when widespread doubt set in after revel ations of gross government complicity in the Contra arms-for-drugs affair was it possible for respectable opposition, beginning with Mayor Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore, to emerge.

The realcoup de grace was self-inflicted, as the Reagan boom collapsed, spectacularly, on Black Monday, Oct. 19, 1987. Four days earlier, just before noon on Thursday the 15th, Dana pulled together four yippie sympathizers to hold a banner in front of the New York Stock exchange that said "JUMP!" Dana and co were assailed by irate stockbrockers, but in the next three days, the market fell 650 points. Later he talked to someone who'd worked inside, who told him the crash was really just a matte r of the market's collective coke habit catching up with it. In the picture on the facing page, Dana is second-from-the-left, head bent behind the banner (NEWSWEEK).

Meanwhile, in the commodity marts of Chicago, Richard Dennis was also betting the m arket would crash. The difference was that Dennis, a gay libertarian with a strong belief in drug legalization, walked away with market futures profits variously estimated from $40 to $400 million. He teamed up with Arnold Trebach and Kevin Zeese of the Drug Policy Foundation to make a serious drive to legalize drugs. In autumn of 1988, there were hearings in front of Congressman Charles Rangel's Select Sub-committee on Narcotics, and ABC NEWS convened the most American of institutions, an electronic to wn meeting:

...Getting the Last Word--

The Ted Koppel Town Meeting on Drug Legalization, Sept 8th, 1988:

Cong. Rangel: I'm asking you--you say that the 13-year-old can't get it, as if you have some scheme as to who can get it. Would you have to be an addict to get it?

Hugh Downs: Anybody can get drugs now.

Cong. Rangel: I'm asking--under legalization--would the pharmacist be able to give it? Would you have to go to a doctor to get it?

Hugh Downs: Wouldn't he be able to do the same kind of thing as with liquor, and determine somebody's age

Cong. Rangel: You're asking me questions. I'm asking--what kind of control would it be?!

E. Nadelman:

I would think that the first thing to do would be to make marijuana legally available--and fairly readily available.

Ted Koppel: To everyone...

E. Nadelman: To adults. Like alcohol and tobacco, but with stricter controls. We know right now that sixty million Americans in this country have smoked marijuana. Between twenty and thirty million are smoking it right now. We have zero ove rdose deaths. We know that the vast majority of people who smoke marijuanahave not gone on to harder drugs...

Cong. Rangel: Get to cocaine.

E. Nadelman: Last week the Administrative Judge of the DEA, in a suit which asked whether or not marijuana should be made legally available for medical purposes to deal with chemotherapy-

Cong. Rangel: What happened to crack cocaine and heroin?

E. Nadelman: You know the polite thing to do would be to let me at least finish what I'm saying.

Cong. Rangel: You'll be for legalizing cigarettes next.

E. Nadelman: Listen-- everybody on this panel that's opposed to legalization is opposed to legalizing marijuana. Now the DEA Judge said that compared in toxicity to aspirin, marijuana is overwhelmingly safer.

Bob Stutman: It's foolish to legalize marijuana.

E. Nadelman: He said that marijuana is perhaps one of the safest psycho-active substances ever known to man.

Outburst in the audience!

Ed Koch: Everybody believes--

E. Nadelman: When Mayor Koch talks about throwing users in jail, when Mayor Koch says that sixty million Americans...

Ed Koch: Everybody believes that the drugs that have to be addressed now are cocaine and heroin and crack, and when we've addressed those, even though most of us believe that marijuana ought to not be legalized, that's the last one on the list...

Outburst in the back of the hall!

Cong. Rangel: He didn't answer the question!

Ed Koch: "...and what he has done is to dodge the issue.

E. Nadelman: Ted, it's the first one. You start with marijuana. Marijuana of all the illicit drugs is the safest...

Ted Koppel: Hold it! Just all of you hold it one second--turning to the audience, calling on the source of the outburst--- the gentleman behind you who was yelling...

Dana: My name is Dana Beal, I've been...

Ted Koppel: I don't care what your name is, what were you yelling about?

Dana: Okay. The exact quote from the Federal Judge was "the safest, therapeutically active substance known to mankind." That means safer than caffeine, safer than aspirin...

Ted Koppel: Yeah--

Dana: That means you're putting people in jail for basically doing something that's completely harmless.

Ted Koppel: Let me turn to--

Dana: How can you talk about locking people up in work camps? How can you talk about taking people's...

Ed Koch: We're talking about cocaine and heroin.

Dana: ...taking people's homes away from them, evicting people in New York City. Why don't you want to go after the worst first? And this is the real point--how can you justify a situation where you've eliminated pot, but crack--an d heroin--are four times more available, four times cheaper than at the beginning of the Reagan War on Drugs. All you've done, is design a system that gets rid of marijuana, leaving hard drugs! That's all you've done.

Ted Koppel: I think...

Dana: And that's to the guy from the DEA.

Ted Koppel: ...if we can cut that mike over there for a minute now, Dr. Jaffee, you are one of our most distinguished experts here. ... I would like to address the question to you, when that Judge---I must confess I didn't read the decision, I rea d reports of the Judge's the decision--true? marijuana really the safest-- what was the phrase--"therapeutic drug, the safest therapeutic drug?"

Ed Rosenthal: The safest therapeutically active substance known to humankind.

Ted Koppel: What do you think Doctor?

Jerome Jaffee:

I think it's nonsense.

[Richard_smoker]

CHAPTER 5: The Staten Island Project


In 1981 the marijuana movement was divided between NORML ("the suits") and a larger group of activists who did smoke-ins. Today's Drug Reform Movement (the Drug Policy Foundation and its offshoots) was still a glimmer in the future. NORML was in eclip se, having lost its Capitol Hill clout when Carter Drug Czar Dr. Peter Bourne got caught writing a phony script for quaaludes. That activated a little tidbit about Bourne doing coke at a NORML party, planted with columnist Jack Anderson by NORML head Kei th Stroup. Stroup thought of this as insurance in his running feud with the White House; not realizing Bourne was the best negotiating partner he was going to get. (Some of his own judgment was missing due to coke.)

The DEA became the lead agency for U.S. drug policy for ten years until, exasperated, Congress re-established the Drug Czar office by statute in 1988.

When Reagan came in, federal agencies were forbidden even to deal with NORML. The other side wouldn't appear on the same television panel with them. But the marijuana movement of the smoke-ins was unfazed. For five years, until Howard Lotsof started ND A International and achieved self-sufficiency in '86-87, tremendous resources were secretly diverted from legalizing pot to Ibogaine. Like some Third World country developing nuclear weapons, up to half of the YIPPIE GNP went either to the Project or to c orollary organizing like RAR and the GREENS, in order to gain access and build support in the Black and environmental movements.

After Howard and Norma moved to Staten Island from Brooklyn, it was only a matter of time before people in the loop started calling it "the Staten Island Project." And there was the same degree of secrecy as the Manhattan Project, based at first on as sumptions that forces within the government would once again stop it, and after Howard's decision to go for patents, to protect it from being pirated and suppressed by corporate interests.

Initially, in '81, Ibogaine was a research project tucked away in a RAR task force innocently called Citizens Against Heroin. Other activities included publication in OVERTHROW of a lengthy report on complicity of World Nazism and the Intelligence Comm unity in the rising heroin influx ("A New Heroin Conspiracy?"), and a demo against blatant police corruption in the Ninth Precinct. By April, however, Howard was already moving to put the Ibogaine Project on independent footing to spare it from intra-YIP PIE feuding. Then everyone ran out of money, at once.

As 1981 wore on, though, Howard found that a back injury made it imposible to continue as a film-maker, or to pursue his back-up gig as a plumber. His options were narrowing. In December, he landed the first large-scale contribution from an outside source: $4,000. At a Christmas party he ran into a woman he knew who said she had a boyfriend who was an addict, and she would be very interested in treating him. He told her he needed money for basic research, and she put him back at work in the libraries.

From the original RAR-sponsored literature search of NYU Library, Howard had several books and about two hundred articles on Ibogaine and Tabernanthe iboga. These he studied while he continued to scour other sources for additional materials mentioned in the footnotes. Thenfor about 6 months he again ran out of money. When he could resume, at end of 1982, his next move was get everything translated from French, and to document every paper ever done on Ibogaine. That took about 6 months, with the help of a research librarian. What he was looking for was a clearl y demonstrable relationship between the biochemical mechanisms of action of Ibogaine and the biochemical mechanisms of action of the opiates. So after he reviewed about a century of work on ibogaine, he reviewed the last twenty-five years of biochemical research on the opiates.

What he found was that every system the opiates work on Ibogaine works on --like the neurohormonal system in the brain, the central nervous system, the production of proteins relating to RNA templating. Virtually every system where the opiates were active, Ibogaine also was active. Additionally, he ran across the 1956 paper by Jurg Schneider, who was working at CIBA-GEIGY at the time, but went on to become President of Dupont's Biochemicals Division. It said Ibogaine potentiates morphine analgesia. It wasn't analgesic itself, but combined with morphine, it could reduce by fifty percent (!) the amount of morphine used to maintain a certain level of freedom from pain.

The state of Howard's understanding of Ibogaine at the end of 1983 can pretty much be seen in the original patent for treatment of morphine addiction (U.S. #4,499, 096), filed November 18, 1983, in the section reproduced here, with asides:

Historical Background

Ibogaine is one of at least twelve alkaloids found in theTabernatheiboga shrub of West Africa. The indigenous peoples have used the drug as a ritual, ordeal or initiation potion in large dosages and a stimulant in smaller doses. One of the first Europe an references to the drug was made by Professor Baillon at the March 6th, 1889, session of the Linnean Society in Paris during which he described samples obtained by Griffon de Bellay from Gabon and the French Congo.

Early isolation and identification of Ibogaine was accomplished by Dybrowski and Landrin (Compt. rend. ac. sc. 133:748, 1901); Haller and Heckel (ibid. 133:850); Lambert and Heckel (ibid. 133: 1236) and Landrin (Bull. sc. pharm. 11:1905).

Interest in the drug seemed to lie fallow until it was picked up by Raymond-Hamet and his associates. E. Rothbin and Raymond-Hamet published The Effect of Ibogaine on the isolated Rabbit Uterus in 1938 (Compt. rend. soc. biol. 127: 592-4). Raymond-Ha met continued to study the drug for twenty-two years. He himself published nine papers: Pharmacological Action of Ibogaine (Arch. intern. pharmacodynamie, G3: 27-39, 1939), Two Physiological Properties Common to Ibogaine and Ephedrine (Ibid. 134: 541-4, 1940), Difference Between Physiological Action of Ibogaine and That of Cocaine (Ibid. 211: 285-8, 1940), Mediate and Intermediate Effects of Ibogaine on the Intestine (Compt. rend. soc. biol. 135: 176-79, 1941), Pharmacologic Antagonism of Ibogaine (Compt. rend. 212: 768-771, 1941), Some Color Reactions of Ibogaine (Bull. soc. chem. biol., 25: 205-10, 1943), Sym-pathicosthenic Actions of Ibogaine on the Vessels of the Dog's Paw (Compt. rend. 223: 757-58, 1946), and Interpretation of the Ultr aviolet Absorption Curves of Ibogaine and Tabernathine (Ibid. 229: 1359-61, 1949).

D. Vincent began his work on Ibogaine by a collaboration with I. Sero: Inhibiting Action of Tabernathe Iboga on Serum Cholinesterase (Compt. rend. Soc. Biol. 136: 612-14, 1942), [this effect is the key to "behavioral immobility" during the first 3-4 hours of treatment]. Vincent participated in the publication of five other papers: The Ultraviolet Absorption Curves of Ibogaine and Tabernathine (B. Brustier, D. Vincent and I. Sero, Compt. rend. 216, 909-11, 1943), Detection of Cholinesterase Inhibi ting Alkaloids (D. Vincent and Paul Beaujard, Ann. pharm. franc. 3: 22-26, 1945), The Cholinesterase of the Pancreas: Its Behavior in the Presence of Some Inhibitors in Comparison with the Cholinesterases of Serum and Brain (D. Vincent and P. Lagreu, Bull. soc. c hem. biol. 31: 1043-45, 1949); and two papers, which he and Raymond-Hamet worked on together: Action of Some Sympathicosthenic Alkaloids on the Cholinesterases (Compt. rend. soc. giol. 150: 1384-1386, 1956) and On Some Pharmacological Effects of Thre e Alkaloids of Tabernathe Iboga: Ibogamine, Iboluteine and Tabernathine (Compt. rend. soc. biol. 154: 2223-2227, 1960).

The structure of Ibogaine was investigated by Dickel et. al. (J.A.C.S. 80, 123, 1958). The first total synthesis was cited by Buchi et al. (J.A.C.S. 87, 2073, 1965 and J.A.C.S. 88, 3099, 1966).

In 1956 Salmoiraghi and Page elucidated Ibogaine's relations to serotonin (J. Pharm. I. expt. ther. 120(1) 20-25, 1957-9). About the same time J.A. Schneider published three important papers. The first, Potentiation of Ibogaine on Morphine Analgesia, was done in collaboration with Marie McArthur (Experientia 12: 323-324, 1956) [and gave the earliest clue to Ibogaine's unique interaction with opiates]. The second was Neuropharmacological Studies of Ibogaine: An indole alkaloid with.Central-Stimulant P roperties (Scheider, J.A. and Sigg. E.B. , Annals of the NY acad. of sciences, Vol. 66, 765-776, 1957) and third was An Analysis of the Cardiovascular Action of Ibogaine HCI (J.A. Schneider and R.K. Rinhard, Arch. int. pharmcodyn, 110 92-102, 1957 ) [which showed Ibogaine's temporary cardio-vascular stimulant effect is independent of the central nervous system, the first indication that caution should be observed in giving it to people with weak tickers.]

Ibogaine's stimulant properties were further investigated by Chen and Bonner in A Study of Central Nervous System Stimulants (J. Pharm. and Expt. Ther., 123 (3): 212-215, 1958 [the first indication Ibogaine is ahealant; rats pretreated with Iboga ine recovered from electroshock twice as fast as those treated with saline (i.e., nothing).] Gershon and Lang published A Psychological Study of Some Indole Alkaloids (Arch. intern. pharmacodynamic, 135: 31-36, 1962).

In 1969, Claudio Naranjo reported on the effects of both Ibogaine and harmine in human subjects in his paper: Psychotherapeutic Possibilities of New Fantasy-Enhancing Drugs (Clinical Toxicology, 2(2): 209-224, June 1969).

H.I. Dhahir, in his 1971 doctoral thesis, published A Comparative Study of the Toxicity of Ibogaine and Serotonin (University Microfilm International 71-25-341, Ann Arbor, Mich.) [in which he established that Ibogaine is less toxic than the common n eurotransmitter serotonin]. His paper gives an overview of much of the work accomplished with Ibogaine.

Additional studies of interest include: The effects of Some Hallucinogens on Aggressiveness of Mice and Rats (Kostowski et al., Pharmacology 7: 259-263, 1972), Cerebral Pharmacokinetics of Tremor-Producing Harmala and Iboga Alkaloids (Zetler et al. , Pharmacology 7(4): 237-248, 1972), High Affinity 3H Serotonin Binding to Caudate: Inhibition By Hallucinogens and Serotonergic Drugs (Whitaker, P. and Seeman, P., Psychopharmacology 59: 1-5, 1978 Biochemistry) and A Common Mechanism of Lysergic Acid. Indolealkylamine And Phenethylamine Hallucinogens: Serotonergic mediation of Behavioral Effects in Rats (Sloviter, Robert et al. J Pharm. & Expt. Ther., 214 (2): 231-238, 1980).

While Howard harvested data, Dana was still looking for vindication. On St. Paddy's Day, 1981, a small but real bomb had gone off outside 9 Bleecker in the faces of two bomb squad officers. The SOHO WEEKLY NEWS, already gunning for a felony conviction for the firecracker promptly ran a full page charging that if Beal himself hadn't done it for the publicity, he should be locked up anyway as "the leader of a violent cult" and a danger to the community who "attracted violence." They called him "Jim Jones on Bleecker Street." The real perpetrators were never caught, although all indications are it was one of two people on the fringes of the SOHO WEEKLY NEWS itself. But coming after four days of mass media hysteria about the martyrdom of the two cops (who were not maimed, although one lost part of his eyesight), such character assassination made an impression that long outlasted the trial.

So in the summer of 1981, dead broke, Dana found himself handing John Spacely, ex-publisher of Punk magazine, $20 bills for info about the Marcia Resnick/Johnny Thunders/John Belushi connection which Bill Kunstler might be able to use during the firecracker trial. Spacely was maing a movie about punks on junk with Lech Kowalski, who'd already chonicled the fall of Sid Vicious in the film DOA: A Rite of Passage. Spacely was strung out, and when the junk need was in him, he'd talk freely. Kunstler never used most of most of Spacely's information, however, because he firmly believed no one should be denounced for their private habits, not even to save a client.

But Dana's trial and partial acquittal had so shifted the debate on heroin that by Christmas, when Dana was released from 35 days in prison on Riker's Island--where he wrote much of "The Secret History of the '70's"-- Abbie Hoffman was busily publicizing his own benefit for Veritas, a residential program specializing in treatment of heroin addiction. Benefit organizer Jill Seiden had convinced her friend DA Robert Morgenthau that Abbie was such an important counter-culture figurehead that having him publicly affirm that heroin was much more sious than grass, or acid, or even coke, would make a difference to millions of people. Such a difference, in fact, that Abbie's sentence on the 1973 cocaine rap should be reduced. In January, 1982, Dana, Howard, Norma and and virtually everyone they knew attended Abbie's first benefit for Veritas. All of a sudden, anti-heroin was hip. And so Abbie Hoffman succeeded in maintaining his radical credibility while securing a substantial reduction in his imprisonment.

Dana's trial also caused SOHO owner Robert Maxwell to check into rumors that his paper had a heroin problem. He discovered a $1.2 million defici t, and folded the SOHO in 1982. Covering-up to the bitter end, one staffer wrote in the NEW YORK TIMES Op-Ed that the SOHO WEEKLY NEWS had been shut down by a bomb.

So Dana was motivated. He kept asking when there would be an Ibogaine story OVERTHROW could publish, and more to the point, when there would be some Ibogaine, since Spacely was only the most prominent of scores who it seemed had become strung out in the early 80's. Spacely, a former member of the STP family, had no problem with a 36 hour trip, and volunteered repeatedly to do Ibogaine once the shooting of Gringo was finished.

But Howard's experiences had led him to a somewhat different set of con-clusions. Most important--he realized the goal was not to treat a few hundred addicts, underground, only to be shut down again by the DEA. His goal was to make Ibogaine a viable alternative, and treat millions. He had to get patents, which could be challenged if any premature leaks in the press undermined his claims of originality. (Fortunately, when Dana tried to pull an end-run in mid-'83 by getting something in HIGH TIMES, now staffed with ex-SOHOites, D.A. Latimer was unsympathetic. His response: "Why would anyone want to quit drugs?"

High Times was interviewing respresentatives of the British, French and German marijuana movements, assembled for the '83 World Cannabis March on the UN on the first Saturday of
May-the first US appearance of the original hemp proponent , Dr. Hans-Georg_Behr, author of
Von Hanf Ist Die Rede. But Latimer was unwilling to run anything new on the US movement,
either Ibogaine or the pioneering work of Boston's "Doc" Humes, whose Unidentified Flying Idea
was successfully using black hash for heroin detox, in conjunction with accupressure massage at 45 minute intervals. Harold Humes' views on the historic clash of Persian enlightenment and Baby-
lonian obscurantism never got the exposure to the High Times audience they probably deserved.

That year Howard informed Dana he was resigning as producer of the annual May Central Park Rock Against Racism Concert to work full-time on Ibogaine. "With RAR, it's fight the same battle every year. Your problem is that the Black and Jewish groups don't want to work together," he told Dana (who never again found anyone as competent to put on the concert). "I'd rather be a healer. I want to do something permanent ."

But Howard and Norma did come in for the publication party of Blacklisted News, held on the fifth
anniversary of Tom Forcade's wake.Jill Seiden had booked it at the Limelight, a new club which
was supposed to be scandalous because it was in a de-consecrated church. Everyone was there, in-
cluding John Spacely, who informed Dana he'd run out of patience waiting for the Ibogaine,and
quit the old-fashioned way, cold turkey. Outside, a severe culture clash erupted between doormen
and Yippies who didn't meet the dress code. Mitch "the Bitch" Blotter, sometimes of David Peel's
band and several others were arrested before Ben Zippie came out and stopped everything by stripping naked.

Meanwhile inside the church, Howard Lotsof was engrossed with Hans Georg-Behr, himself a psychiatrist/addictionologist,swapping the most advanced secrets of the US and German under-
grounds-the secret of Ibogaine for hemp information. Georg, who was back in the US trying to find a publisher,never succeeded in getting his book out in English. Instead, a summary prepared the
next year for another publisher and several thousand dollars worth of research were turned over to Jack Herer of the California Marijuana Initiative to use to bring out a White Paper.

But Hans-Georg stayed at 9 Bleecker for another month and a half, sharing reminiscences with Les
Ledbetter, who was in the process of quitting the New York Times after being found with two
joints in his locker. This was unfair, since Les was being fired for the very credentials which got
him hired in the first place, including being a White House page at age 18, in which capacity Les
procured pot for John Kennedy, used it medicinally for back pain. Later, at the height of the Vietnam war protests, Les was hired by the Time because they had no one inside the counter-culture.Les soon became part of Forcade's Capitol Hill "Underground Press Syndicate" network,
around the time Tom pied the US Commissioner of Pornography. In twelve years, Les graduated from the youth beat to edit the night edition, until Times illegally searched his locker.

Ironically, Les died less than two years later, carried off by a flu because years of alcohol and cocaine (which he would do in the wee hours, after getting off work as night editor) had left him with only seven per cent of his liver. A victim of cocaethylene poisoning, butst for trying to use something less toxic, Les edited Overthrow for a couple of issues with Georg's friend Tom Todd, who hung around after George left.

Behr went back to Germany a few weeks after the 1983 NORML Formal, where he met Eric Sterling, staffert of U.S. Congressm,an Robert Drinan, who was about to be reassigned to the House Judiciary Committee. Eric was able to arrange for Georg to "testify" about the Dutch system of separating cannabis and hard drugs--but only to two staffers, one of who only came to denounce the Greens a LaRouche.

By the end of 1983, Howard realized he needed help from real professionals. He made the first of many approaches to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), where he found that this part of the government, at least, was not about to shut him down. They just wouldn't take him seriously. The '60's hysteria about psychedelics might be a fadin g memory, but everyone at NIDA immediately pigeon-holed Lotsof's account of a twenty-year old Ibogaine experiment with the LSD claims of Tim Leary. And despite Leary's statistical record of success treating prison recidivisim, NIDA-crats could fall back on the fact that the risk/benefit ratio with LSD had already been reckoned unacceptable by a higher authority--the U.S. Congress.

No one was paying any attention to Lotsof's real point: the interruption of addiction was due to a distinct pharmacologic effect of the Ibogaine itself, and not--as with LSD--interaction with a good therapist. Now when he was reviewing the opiate literature, he came across a paper by Dr. Doris, Clouet, who had reviewed 256 other medical projects relating to opiates, and cla ssified and catalogued them. Howard ended up giving her a grant to study his data and explain it to him. For a number of years the other researchers laughed at her behind her back. They called Ibogaine "Clouet's folly."

In Clouet's report to Howard she stated: "I am not certain...that one should expect or wish that Ibogaine should act like an opiate."

And: "I will discuss some of my thinking about possible mechanisms of action... ...I am not adverse to positive clinical studies...with certain precautio ns concerning Ibogaine toxicity, especially in "at risk" groups, clinical settings, double-blind tests, etc. because your invention is a new approach to the treatment of addiction..." "There is no data on toxicity in man... There is no information on the setting in which the trials took place and no information on the presence of a physician at the trials. The data probably does not exist in part because interest in the mechan-isms of action underlying hallucinogenic action has been desultory. Therefore, it is not possible...to make any definitive statement about the relationship between the opiates and [Ibogaine]. It should be mentioned that many therapeutic successes arise empirically and not as the result of a well-defined research program."

Subsequently Clouet confirmed that the fact that Ibogaine abolishes tonic extensor seizure (Chen, Bonner: rigidity of the muscles, as during withdrawal); that it inhibits intestinal contractions; and that it's a nor-adrenalin antagonist--all were specific mechanisms that might interfere with withdrawal.

To get Ibogaine to addicts, in 1983 Howard and Norma had begun setting up a charity, the Dora Weiner Foundation. Lotsof named the foundation after his grand-mother and put Norma in charge of fundraising. But when she went looking for funding for Ibogaine research, the response was more dismal than the at NIDA. They were up against "Just Say No!"

"Ninety percent of the anti-drug abuse foundations were only interested in education," says Lotsof.

"When it comes to solving addiction I found no sympathy for any disease people think is self-induced," Norma recalls. "The reaction was: `Oh, you're a ddicted--serves you right, suffer!' That's what they said."

Even if the eventual harvest of ignoring Ibogaine was more death and addiction, rehabilitation of an obscure drug didn't square with the strategy of intolerance that was afoot in the land.

[It wa s also some time in mid-1983 that Dana remembers his upstairs roommate Mitch Halberstadt coming in "fuming about tales of a 'Gay-Linked Immune-Deficiency Disease: "It's blatant homophobia!" said Halberstadt. "They're saying that just being gay causes a fatal disease."

Mitch was a member of Gay-Lesbian Anti-Discrimination (GLAD); in the late '70's #9 Bleecker functioned for a couple of years as a back office in putting on annual GAY PRIDE DAY. Many of the kids whom Dana tried and failed to keep from t urning on to heroin at Studio 10 were bisexual or gay. He ran into them again later in ACT-UP.]

The Dora Weiner Foundation managed in just under two years of activity to accrue $4,000. Howard continued to be dependent on handouts from friends and suppor ters in the movement. But he did get one thing: On February 12, 1985, the U.S. Patent Office granted him patent protection for the use of Ibogaine interrupting narcotic dependency.

Described as "an improved method for interrupting the physiological and p sychological aspects of the heroin addiction sydrome," Howard's invention was said to consist in "its high degree of success, the absence of great pain or discomfort accompanying earlier treatments, the ease and convenience of application, the absence of undesirable or persistent side effects and the persistent effectiveness of the treatment." It was "based on the discovery...that Ibogaine hydrochloride and other non-toxic salts of Ibogaine, possess the unexpected unique ability to disrupt...all the sympt omology demonstrated by addicts in their use of and search for heroin."

The patent covered the method of treating heroin addiction via oral administration of between 6 mg. and 19 mg. per kg. body weight, or between 400 and 1,000 milligrams, either once or more than once, but with successive doses being separated by a number of days. In other words, the claim was that it wasn't a maintenance drug.

Howard was ecstatic when he heard his patent had been reported in THE NEW YORK TIMES. Imagine his distress wh en he learned that the Times patent reporter, a genial drunk, had gotten it wrong, and said the ENDABUSE procedure involved intravenous administration--a method that is 10 times more toxic than the proper oral route Lotsof uses.

Howard quickly followed u p on this by filing for U.S. Patent # 4,587,243, for the rapid interruption of cocaine and amphetamine abuse syndromes. And he did one thing more: He furnished an excellent story to OVERTHROW. In the fall of '85 the paper published a world scoop, informa tion known to YIP's inner core but only the inner core until that time. (See illustration, opposite page.) Ibogaine, a psychedelic drug from the African rainforest, had been secretly developed by the movement as a miracle cure for hard drugs.

Now Lotsof was in a position to approach major drug companies. But when he and Norma approached Dupont, Lilly and CIBA-GEIGY, once again they were met with crashing indifference.

"While the indication for narcotic addiction withdrawal is almost certainly worthwhile, it has not been identified as a strategic commitment for our company," wrote Gerald F. Sieschio, licensing manager of CIBA, which held a patent for Ibogaine as a "tonic stimulant" up until 1970. They were so uninterested, in fact, that they turned ov er all their files (the equivalent of a million dollars in research) to Lotsof, gratis. That's how he got the Isbell letter.

That same year Du Pont's associate director of product licensing, Hermann S. Weissman, told Lotsof, "Our Research and Marketing gro ups have come to the conclusion that Ibogaine does not fall within the priorities of our developmental pharmceutical program."

Lotsof learned the majors had no interest in developing a natural alkaloid they could not call their own. "The type of patent pr otection the pharmaceutical companies prefer is one in which they actually own the molecule," he says.

"Our patent protection is use protection--we own the rights to use Ibogaine pursuant to drug dependency. They could earn a million dollars distributing it but their board of directors would say, 'What's a million dollars to us?' That's why our company has its own special niche. "The second reason they're not interested is the stigma of drug dependency, and I'll give you an example: clonidine. A group of researchers at Yale discovered that clonidine, an anti-hypertensive, was useful in ameliorating withdrawal. They got a patent for that use, and Boehringer-Ingleheim, which was the initiator of clonidine, bought up that patent and sat on it. The last thin g they wanted was for the middle-class hypertensive to walk into the pharmacy with a clonidine script and be pegged as an addict. They don't consider that profitable.

"The third reason is that Ibogaine is a Schedule I Drug. It takes three to six months for the paperwork to clear the DEA just to move it around the country."

The big drug companies were not interested, but Howard had one more move before he started his own company. He called the Director of Clinical research at NIDA, Barry Brown, who gave him introductions to Herb Kleber, Richard Resnick and Arnold Washton--all prominent drug researchers. He managed to get several of them to serve on his foundation's advisory board: Doctors Kleber, Resnick (one of the developers of naltrexone), and Robert Milman (director of the Substance Abuse Unit at New York Hospital.

Next he contacted various persons within the government: Charles Rangel, the Chairman of the House Select Committee on narcotics; Nancy Reagan, Al-phonse D'Amato, Guy Molinari, Cuomo and K och. Rangel was the first to respond, asking NIDA Director William Pollin to evaluate the procedure. Howard followed this up with a letter asking Pollin how he intended to evaluate it, and if he had the money to do so.

Pollin's reply cited Doris Clouet's conclusion that there was no evidence in the existing literature that Ibogaine could act as a substitute narcotic--without her point that this wouldn't be desirable in an interrupter anyway.

"She further expresses concern about toxicity. She refers specifically to changes in blood pressure, but we would in addition worry about longer term neurological and psychological effects, including the potential for Ibogaine like other hallucinogens becoming a drug of abuse. ..."

"Perceptual problems, visual hall ucinations, motor difficulties..." suggested to Dr. Pollin a "potential for brain damage."

In his next letter Pollin mentioned the need for FDA approval and sufficient funding to carry out the research, suggesting that Lotsof submit an application for a g rant from NIDA. Lotsof replied that in designing an investigational new drug application (IND) for the FDA, he'd come across data "relating to the 'potential for brain damage'..." in Dhahir's 1971 paper: "No brain damage was evident after 30 day chronic studies at fifty milligrams per kilogram day. The average dose for our proto-col is about nine per kilogram day in a single-administration treatment."

What Howard did next was to write to Rangel and say, "Look, I've got Herb Kleber, Richard Resnick and Robert Milman, the top people in the field, ready to evaluate this." When he sent copies of all this correspondence to Kleber, Milman and Resnick, they resigned. They resigned because he was using them not for research, but to attract money to do research.

"He said money was not an issue," Kleber recalled recently. (And Howard truly believed money would not be an issue, once he made his case.) "Then I got calls from across the country. Howard was using my name to raise money to do this research." Kleber was interested in keeping tabs on Ibogaine, but all three experts wanted $110 an hour apiece just to meet--$2,000-a-day, which Howard didn't have. And when the advisory board names were used in a letter to Rangel to get that funding from Congress, Kle ber, Resnick and Milman all resigned from the board. Kleber told Howard he'd crossed the line by using the names "pro-actively," i.e., in a way that undermined his reputation for scientific objectivity.

Howard wondered what the Hell an advisory board is g ood for, if you can't put it on the letterhead of your foundation. But Herb Kleber had mixed motives. He was working closely with Yale University psychiatrist Dr. Thomas R. Kosten, who has called Ibogaine "snake oil! It works for everything--nothing works like that."

They were deep in preliminary studies of their own drug, buprenorphine, an opiate "agonist/antagonist" that seemed to show promise as a treatment of crack. That promise didn't hold up in subsequent studies. Ibogaine does work for crack (a big problem in '86), and unlike buprenorphin, it's not a maintenance drug. Buprenorphine is somewhat useful as a maintenance, or as a de-tox, for opiates (withdrawal is mild compared to methadone). But as a euphoric psychoactive, it seemed a much safer be t to pass the regulatory hurdles than Ibogaine--even if it didn't ultimately work out. And if Ibogaine worked, it would obsolete buprenorphin before it got off the ground.

"My issue is not with Ibogaine but with Howard Lotsof," says Kleber, who later b ecame Bush's Deputy Drug Czar for Demand Reduction, his treatment expert. "I don't want to tar a chemical with the personality of the person pushing it."

Today buprenorphine is near completion of Phase III trials--the last stage before approval. The Medic ations Development Division of NIDA didn't really start evaluating Ibogaine until Kleber was on his way out of the White House New Executive Office Building Annex to head up the Substance Abuse Division at Columbia University._

[Richard_smoker]

CHAPTER 6: Bob Sisko

Before their falling out, Kleber did introduce Lotsof to Louis Harris, a very prominent biochemist in the opiate field. Harris maintained colonies of addicted animals at the Medical College of Virginia. He and Mario Aceto started designing studies to t est Ibogaine on those animals. Harris told Lotsof another person he should check with. Arthur Jacobson, at the National Institute of Mental Health's Committee on Problems of Drug Dependency, was willing to run and pay for additional studies on any potent ial for abuse with Ibogaine.

One bit of information Howard did get from Pollin was that the Director of the Addiction Research Center, Jerome Jaffee, was interested. Jaffee was about to replace Pollin as head of NIDA. Howard called him, and he put Howard in touch with Dr. Robert L ange. Lange introduced him to a chemical company. He also put him in contact with a lab in Massachusetts competent to do FDA work that agreed to design and budget studies. But he was still $50,000 short of the money it would take to produce and refine t he Ibogaine.

In 1986, Lotsof formed NDA International and with a small band of friends, lawyers and investors, secured the worldwide use patents for Ibogaine. The patent (#4,587,243) for coke and amphetamine came through May 6th.

Howard's first important investor was Leo Zeff. One of the Grand Old Men of Ibogaine, Dr. Zeff had given it to more than 500 of his psychiatric patients when psychedelic research was still respectable. The famed Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo, who is much better known because he published The Healing Journey in the late '60's, was Zeff's protege. When Lotsof contacted Zeff in Los Angeles, Zeff was transfixed by Howard's explanation of Ibogaine's effect as an addiction interrupter. He immediately reviewed all his files, and came up with only three who had substance abuse problems.

"They all quit drugs!" he said, when he got back to Howard, "but there were only three who were drug abusers, so I never noticed. When it worked, you see, the Ibogaine always transformed the patient completely."

"What do you mean?" asked Howard. "What were the effects?"

"With Ibogaine, we got the most wonderful effects." Zeff immediately withdrew $25,000 from his life savings and invested it in the company. Howard took the money and sponsored the first international Ibogaine symposium in Paris in January, 1987. He br ought together the twelve foremost experts in the world, including Zeff, Robert Goutarel, Otto Gollnhofer, H. Deportere, and William Gladstone.

"The common denominator is Iboga," explained Professor Otto Gollnhofer in his opening remarks, placing Lotsof's discovery in perspecitive: "If we have cancer and AIDS against which we are struggling, another of the evils of our era is 'drugs,' which may have more victims then any other. The stakes are enormously high."

Lotsof addressed the conferees, giving a detailed account of Ibogaine effects at the therapeutic dose before patients finally fall asleep. Upon awaking, Lotsof explained, "patients...no longer possess the desire to use cocaine and other drugs."

The experts, skeptical of this claim, begain to grill Lotsof, probing and challenging. The onslaught began when Goutarel, honorary director of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), asked, "If the patient is cured, why do you have to repeat the treatment six months later?"

"The effects of the treatment are not permanent," Lotsof responded.

Goutarel fired back, "What is the status of the patient when he leaves the hospital?"

"Completely drug free." Lotsof went on to explain that Ibogaine's effects are only temporary, and the same drives and forces that lead patients to use drugs in the first instance gradually return. Under fire, Lotsof was cool and professional, displaying knowledge and exertise on a par with, if not greater than, many of those present.

Professor Portier, Director of the Natural Substance Division of the CNRS, quizzed Lotsof likea headmaster would a sophomore: "Can you define what you mean by 'anxiety'?

"I define anxiety in these terms: an increased adrenergic activity which begins to create a state of discomfort in the patient." As the probing continued, Lotsof passed each test put to him, winning the respect and acceptance of those present. As a peer, he had been through a sort of scientific "rite of passage.' Acknowledged as an expert by the experts, Lotsof sat down and shared his insights and experiences of 25 years with Ibogaine.

The upshot was a call for an international research initiative. "We must puit forth all of the information we have on the subject from every field," said Professor Gollnhofer, calling for the creation of an interdisciplinary team to conduct Iboga research.

Among the attendeess was Dr Peter Baumann, a Swiss paychiatrist from Zurich. Baumann had been influencewd by Naranjo, and Naranjjo's whol approach to Ibogaine gre out of his experience with harmaline, which is like a stripped-down Iboga molecule. To get his patients to verbalize--they tended to withdraw or even doze on harmaline--Naranjo customarily administered it with ampetamines, a practice he extended to Ibogaine. Hence his descriptions of Ibogaine as "engendering unique rage." [Quips Howard: "Patients on Ibogain and speed, mand as Hell, because he was trying to distract them from their visualizations in order to grill them about what they were seeing!"]

All of the other experts present blamed the "unique rage" phenomenon on Naranjo's technique. And they were all being deferential to Zeff, who had given Ibogaine to many more people than Baumann, who was somewhat in the minority in feeling psychiatric intervention during the actual Ibogaine was the key to successful therapy, as with LSD.

"That was not my experience," said Zeff. "Of everything we tried, Ibogaine achieved the most profound personal transformation of the patient--which after all is the goal and purpose of psychiatry. When it worked, the therapist was just a bystander."

Baumann berated him. "What do you know, old man. I was Claudio Naranjo's protege."

"Ah yes, Naranjo. He was a student of mine." Everyone present was embarrassed by Baumann's attempt to humiliate the older man.

[Baumann, however, nursed a grudge, and in 1990 blamed Ibogaine for the death of one of his clients at his villa in France during an i llicit (his Swiss license was not valid there) group therapy ses-sion. It may well have been caused by Baumann's intrusive badgering technique. The poor woman had a weak heart; but death was inconsistent with Ibogaine over-dose-- it occured not at onset but four hours after administration, when it should have begun to wear off, and only 400 mg. were given. Baumann, however, was mostly interested in "clearing" his drug of preference, MDMA, several doses of which turned up missing in the ensuing investigation. Swiss regulatory authorities recently determined the Ibogaine was not the cause of death. But Howard had long since informed all of his collaborators, world wide, and established a procedure for administration of an antidote.]

From Paris, Howard and Norma flew to Libreville, Gabon, accompanied by Bob Sisko. The three of them met with President Omar Bongo and his science adviser Dr. Jean-Noel Gassitta, who spent two weeks probing Howard's sincerity. In Gabon,Tabernathe iboga , the plant of which Ibogaine is the main alkaloid, is the sacrament of the national religion, Bwiti. Once in a lifetime, often at puberty, the initiate is given enough of the bark of the plant's roots to "split the head" and induce the four to five hours of visualizations necessary to "meet their ancestors." Possibly they may "meet the Bwiti," a kind of universal African ancestor "between man and angel" equivalent in their religion to the Holy Spirit in Christianity.

Both Omar Bongo and his predecessor Leon M'ba, the father of Gabonese independence, were Bwiti. Their sacrament was persecuted by colonial authorities. Gabonese are extremely sensitive about being bamboozled by Western druggies and the adverse international regulatory consequences that might ensue from bad press. Export of the root to the outside world is embargoed.

And here was Howard, asking for supplies: "Your Excellency, America and all the "advanced" countries are in the grip of a terrible epidemic of addiction. Many of the victims in my country are African-Americans--kidnapped perhaps from this very land. But we believe that the antidote exists, here in the sheltering rain forest. We believe the anti-toxin for this terrible plague is iboga, the plant which heals the spirit. We implore you to release emergency medical research supplies of iboga, so that testing can begin to demonstrate to our Food and Drug Administration that iboga is safe--"

"I know iboga is safe," replied President Bongo. "I have eaten iboga."

Howard looked him in the eye and said: "I too have eaten iboga, and I know it is safe."

President Bongo's jaw dropped. Howard was an initiate! The President agreed to release forty kilos of root bark to NDA. He said: "This will be Gabon's gift to America." He thought a minute and said: "This will be Gabon's gift to the world."

He flew them in his private plane to Ombway, south of the Equator, where they were personal guests of the Binkt Maktar and other parliamentary notables. Dr. Jean-Noel Gassita took them into the densest forest, to see the giant 35-foot iboga trees, which no westerner had seen for sixty years. In the village, they also saw it under cultivation, and were presented with seeds, which did not, unfortuantely, germinate later when supplied to a botanical garden.

Viewing the old videotape of the trip you can see that Howard and Norma's travelling companion, Bob Sisko, is not his current roly-poly self. He's almost skeletal. He was de facto the addict representative on the trip, since he had a bad coke habit. H e would be the first person treated. He would also be the next great architect of Ibogaine development. In the next two to three years, in new human trials involving two dozen addicts, he would reproduce and verify Howard Lotsof's original results, with f ar closer measurements and greater understanding.

Bob Sisko returned to New York City from Woodstock in 1976 when he divorced his wife Pauline. He moved in on the YIPPIE ground floor (literally, helping rebuild the ground floor of #9). He did a stint in D.C. YIP, recruiting Alice Torbush into the orga nization. Even when he left for a while, he'd be back. He organized the eighteen months' resistance to the eviction of Studio 10 and led CITIZENS AGAINST HEROIN in 1981. He did the RAR concerts with Howard, and assisted somewhat during the Staten Island P roject phase.

But during the first half of the '80s, his pet project was the American Clemency Committee. His celebrated postcard campaign forced New York's Governor Cuomo to free Gary McGivern, a convict accused of killing a guard while actually handcuffed in the back seat of a police car. After the Clemency Committee went into hiatus, Dana asked him: "Why don't you do more on Ibogaine?"

Sisko, whose new thing was a public relations company uptown in the mid-50s, responded by putting together the first corporate package for NDA Interna-tional. He wrote the first product information. He coined the name for the product: "ENDABUSE."

His PR firm shared office space with law offices housing the defense committee for the "New York 8," Black radicals who were successfully fighting off a police frame-up on weapons charges. Later they organized with Al Sharpton. They were never that k een on Ibogaine, despite its RAR pedigree. They associated it with '62 YIPPIE! marijuana decrim. And its representative was Sisko. While others on the scene were quitting coke after the 70s, Sisko continued to do it every day. He was also doing in excess of a liter of vodka a day.

Sisko was accompanying Howard to Gabon because his Israeli contacts would be important for extracting and purifying Ibogaine from the root. By the time they made the trip, though, Sisko was free-basing an eighth of an ounce of coke a day.

The first batch of root bark was bogus--low alkaloid concentrations. The Gabonese had to be massaged into providing a second shipment--the real thing. In the summer of 1987, Omar Bongo visited President Reagan. Unbeknownst to the White House, Lotsof a nd Sisko also arranged to meet with Bongo during his official stay in Washington, D.C. So circumspect was Bongo's security detail in ushering the Ibogaine representatives upstairs, where Bongo received them in shirtsleeves, that the Secret Service didn't even know they were there. Sisko and Howard were almost detained on the way out by flustered feds, until their status as Omar Bongo's honored guests was confirmed by Gabonese security.

President Bongo arranged to have 40 kilos of primo grade iboga delivered by diplomatic pouch to his embasssy in Ottawa, where it was not illegal, and Howard Lotsof could take possession. From Canada the forty kilos of root bark scrapings moved back to Europe, for extraction and reduction into 97% Ibogaine hydrochloride, and then to Israel, for an additional purification process--to 99.7%--to boost absorbability. Then it was shipped, via Europe, back to Canada.

Meanwhile, Sisko's business was falling apart.

"Everyone who knew him was afraid that one day we'd call Sisko," says Howard, "and no one would be alive to answer the phone. Or that we'd get the call. And he'd be dead."

Finally, the Ibogaine was ready. Based on Howard's '60s experience, it was de-cided not to bring it into the United States. Holland, due to its reputation for having the most rational drug policy in Europe, became the site for the first human experim ents with Ibogaine in twenty-five years. Bob Sisko arrived in Holland a few days after a friendly U.S. physician, December 10, 1987.

"I was in the public relations business," he says, "and I was surrounded by cocaine--my clients, the people I worked with. They either wanted it, expected it, or they procured it and put it in front of me.

"What I'd do when I'd travel abroad, is I'd buy a couple of Afrin bottles, you know, and I would empty the Afrin out, and pour the cocaine in. I would fill it up with water, and I would shake it up. Being in the public relations business, you have to be cool. But if you're in a meeting with a straight client, you can always reach in your pocket and take out a bottle of Dristan. And tilt your head back. And nobody knows.

"Before taking Ibogaine, I was sitting around waiting and drinking a great deal, and doing this coke I had in the Afrin bottle, smoking a lot of cigarettes. Finally, the doctor said, 'Yeah, we can do it in the morning,' and then I realized I had only three cigarettes left, and I said, 'This drug--I've been told--takes thirty-six to forty-eight hours. I'll be damned if I'm going to sit here for thirty-six hours without cigarettes.'

"Somebody had to go out for me, in the middle of the night, to get me a pack of Camels. And I took the Ibogaine. And the whole time I didn't smoke. And then I looked up, and I saw the doctor take out a cigarette and light it, and I saw him cough. I sa w his body violently react to it, with a tremendous heave-ho. And I said to myself, 'How is it possible that this brilliant man can continue to ingest small amounts of toxin--twenty, thirty times a day--when he knows it to have a cumulative effect?'
"I haven't had a cigarette since that day."

Here was the first new discovery, one quite unexpected. Ibogaine can interrupt cigarettes . A few years later C. Everette Koop got on TV and informed us cigarettes and heroin share a common narcotic receptor. Since most addicts smoke cigarettes, Sisk o and Howard soon realized this was a big bonus.

But there was more. In the time before and after their trip to Gabon, they had immersed themselves in literatures about the African religious version of the experience. Chapter 18 of James Fernandez's "BWITI--An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa" became part of their orientation package for addicts they were treating. Listen to Bob's account of his first treatment:

"Within an hour of taking it, you start to get wobbly, and say, whoa, I have to lay down. And then time passes, and all of a sudden you look up and a movie screen appears ["Windows."]. You find a place, either a wall or a ceiling--and what happens is your subconscious and all of your repressed memories come forth, and you're able to view it in a totally impartial manner. In the same way as if you were viewing a motion picture. It's just like watching TV. And this is the stuff that might normally get released fifteen-to-twenty-minutes-a-night while you're in REM sleep.

"Then what happens is you go through another stage where you ask questions about what you've experienced, and you come up with answers. And then you go through a third period. You gain access to the information stored in your individual hereditary archive. You meet your ancestors. It was a very spiritual 64experience for me.

"It is a wonder drug. It's like a re-set button, and it clears and re-sets all the neurotransmitters to operate at maximum efficiency, so that everything becomes crystal clear to you. It's a miracle."

And there was more, although like many who have the experience, Sisko was wary of expressing it for a long time. He met Bwiti--very the avatar of the African religion-- a very definite, highly energetic though discorporate entity.

When he saw Howard, though, soon after he got back to New York, they had their first big dispute. Sisko told him, "The Ibogaine really works! I never experienced anything like it. We've got to start treating people--real, live addicts--now."

"As president of a corporation engaged in legitimate pharmaceutical development, I can't get NDA involved in anything that would run afoul of the laws or regulations of the U.S. or any other country where we intend to business," said Howard. "I really sympathize--and I'm interested in sharing your findings. But I can't jeopardize our entire development schedule just to treat a few individuals."

"Howard, people are dying," Sisko objected. "I know dozens of people personally who need Ibogaine. It's not right to withhold it any longer."

The argument raged all winter. By spring relations were icy. It took almost a year, using connection he had established with the head of the Chemistry Department of a large university in Western Africa, for Sisko to get his own Ibogaine.

Among the first to be treated was Fred, a hardcore fiend known to Dana from Studio 10 days. He'd been in and out of jails and Odyssey House since becoming addicted to heroin in 1981. Fred was never a perfect success. But like the patient who can keep his cancer under control with recurrent chemo-therapy, his first treatment in April, 1989, produced such a visible improvement in Fred that Dana completely startled, stopped paying attention to the parade he was marshalling for ten whole minutes. This was long enough for a rival faction to divert the entire back half of the parade to Central Park from its original target, Congressman Charles Rangel's office at 125th Street in Harlem.

Dana had started going to ACT UP meetings in early '88 because he thought the whole Dutch harm reduction ("safe drugs") model was essential to stop AIDS; now he got up and plugged Ibogaine at ACT UP meetings. The change in Fred was so dramatic, Dana also decided the time had come for the drug reform movement to give Ibogaine the same priority a s legalizing pot or clean needles. He staked all his prestige as founder of the smoke-ins on it, and split the pot movement for three years.

Ibogaine prevailed in the end.

Fred even moved into #9 Bleecker. With the re-treatments, he became the most Ibogainized person in the world. And like a scientist puzzling over moon rocks, with each treatment Dana gleaned more data.

"I met Bwiti the first time," said Fred. "All of a sudden this 300-pound Black Buddha a lot like Fats Domino pops into the room and says 'What are you waiting for? Let's go!' He took me on a journey to a pyramid or a mountain of light, and on it were arranged a Star of David, a cross, a star and crescent, all the symbols of the religions. But from the top of the mountain, shining through all of them but superior to all of them, was this blinding light. And I recognized it as the light Moses saw through the burning bush."

Five months later, feeling strong pre-addictive anxiety, he contacted Howard for a re-treatment. During it, Fred re-experienced the Holocaust through the eyes of his mother, a survivor of the camps. Later he was able to describe to his uncle, perfect ly, the faces of relatives who'd died in the Nazi death camps, whom he had no way of knowing. His uncle started crying.

[How do you know if you're having a true religious experience, and not just crazy? Philip Dick says that if you come into information you have no way of knowing, and it later turns out to be true, then perhaps you have had a genuine revelation (a "theophany," he calls it). The catch, of course, is acting in time on it. And if it turns out to be true, the initiate is transposed into realms of freedom--i.e, freedom to act on truth previously unsuspected--realms that would not exist without Iboga.]

Now of everyone connected with the Project, Sisko's scene overlapped most the the original YIPPIES; he is good friends with YIPPIE founder Bob Fass, for instance. Bob lobbied heavily for the treatment of the wife of his friend Joe the Gentle Giant, a 34-year-old woman named Linda T. He had to lobby, because Lind didn't seem like a good candidate for treatment. "Not only was I a drug addict," she said, "I was an unrepentant one."

"Everybody kep saying 'oh, you gotta quit drugs! you gotta quit drugs! And I kept saying 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,' but I didn't really want to, because--let's face it--I could afford it. I'd been doing heroin since I was 14 years old. When I wasn't doing it I was taking pills of some sort. "I didn't think Ibogaine was going to work. The reasoin why I got it was because I was addicted to Dutch heroin."

Sisko wanted to respond to the Dutch doctors who argued that Ibogaine might work on weak American smack, but not real Dutch quality stuff. But Linda had a job that required her to commute to Holland, so she had learned to smoke it there, in the Dutch manner, on tinfoil.

"From what I know," she continued, "the Ibogaine I took was from the Gabon Republic. I looked like a big gelatine capsule. It had this white-silvery powder in it that had been adjusted to my body weight. I just put it in my mouth and took it. There were other people in the room, and in the other room outside, but I preferred to be alone throughout the whole thing. They kept asking me how I felt. My hands were still shaking four day later.

"At seventy minutes, it started hitting me. Then I started getting dizzy. And then I said I think I'm going to lay down... My eyes... my eyelids... when I started closing them, turned into a TV screen. And I'm watching a stage."

She met the Bwiti:

"I came before the Throne, and His face was a mask with which he gestured 'Yes' and 'No' very emphatically - and he had incredibly deep eyes, so deep I kept thinking they must hurt. He spoke only simple words. He said, 'Go Back!' At first I thought he meant go back to the beginning of Ibogaine, which I wanted to do because I was resisting it, but then I understood what he meant when I was jet-propelled back to the beginning of time. And I witnessed the beginning of earth and how it was put together. I saw behind me and past me. I saw from the beginning of time. I had my life handed back to me, here... finish it.

"Immediately after the treatment, my heroin use stopped. It worked immediately. With no heavy withdrawals. Just chils. It changed the way I think - even my personality."

She found her Catholic religious convictions were strengthened; she never again doubted the existence of an afterlife, for example.

"It totally changed my life. I [didn't] have a habit anymore. I experienced chills, but not bad ones. And I was an experienced drugs addict, one that had been through jonesing many times, not always of my own volition. I was still on heroin before I took the Ibogaine. At first, I took the drug, and I thought that I still wanted to get high, what's wrong? And then, you know, as time went on, and the Ibogaine wore on, it took it out of me--the urge. I had been a junkie for many years, so this, to me was something totally new."

Linda provided dramatic confirmation of Lotsof's original '63 finding, that Ibogaine can interrupt addiction even in people who neither particularly want nor expect it to work: "I sort of took it to appease everyone," she said, "and the fucking drug worked. I couldn't believe it. It worked." For the next six months she remained drug free, and used the money she saved to invest and start a business manufacturing gaming equipment, which she was soon shipping all over to new places that were opening up legal gambling. After six months she notified Sisko she was beginning to feel the urge to use heroin again, and needed re-treatment. She had, on three occasions during the previous thirty days, taken quaaludes. But she'd remained junkfree. Win a month, she was re-treated.

Now Linda was something of a social lion of the Manhattan Bohemian set. She was good friends with the "Pople of Pot" Mickey Cesar, leader of the breakaway a few months earlier from the Parade to Congressman Charles Rangel's office. Linda actually appeared in two videos with Mickey around this time while he was out of jail for a spell. So for anyone in the Pople's retinue to pretend Ibogaine didn't work after that was really a matter of focusing on the relapse and ignoring Linda's business sucess. She also happened to be a card-playing buddy of Herbert Hunke, the man who turned William Burroughs on to heroin. He was one of the folks who's just ashappy as can be on his daily 100 mgs. of methadone. But according to Hunke, Ibogaine is the closest thing yet to the cure Burroughs and beats were looking for in the '50's: "Howard Lotsof found the first thing that actually helps you to quit--if you want to."

In October, 1989, Bob Sisko treated the first Dutch addicts--Ron and Geerte F. of the Dutch squatters movement. Geerte--back from Holland after opening up Umbrella House squat on Avenue C asround the corner from Sisko's place on East 3rd Street--had found out about Ibogaine in New York. She was anxious to get a treatment for Ron, her multiply-addicted boyfriendl.

Both treatments were a success, even though Geerte tried to resist the Ibogaine's effects. Bob went back to New York, leaving Geerte and Ron enough Ibogaine to treat ten addi tional Dutch junkies. "At first," she says, "Everyone was totally cynical. No one is more cynical than a junkie. But by the end, they were banging on my door, saying, 'Treat us, treat us!' and there wasn't enough Ibogaine." She adds: "Ibogaine is not the solution in itself, although it takes away withdrawal completely. Ibogaine helps you to realize that all power is available to cure yourself through willpower."

What first convinced all her junkie friends Ibogaine was for real was that Ron, her boyfriend, was selling his 65 milligram daily dose of methadone, and spending the money, not on coke or smack, but on camping gear for their upcoming trip to Nepal. The powerful purgative action of Ibogaine (prized by the Africans) had flushed the methadone right out of his system.

Ibogaine interrupts methadone addiction. In thirty-six hours, just like heroin. No more two to six months of excruciating withdrawal. This was the second great unexpected finding of Sisko's paraclinical research. It would reverberate powerfully back through the anti-methadone movement, especially the ex-Black Panther accupuncturists.

When Sisko got back from Holland, he was heavily lobbied by Dana and Fred on behalf of Jeff--a friend of Charles Kritsky, who'd known Howard and Sisko since the day his wife Joan set type for YIPster Times, circa '77-'78. A big fan of Spinrad and a New York survivor of Forcade's Chaoticist circle, Charlie was a half-German, half-Puerto Rican from the Lower East Side. Most of his childhood friend had become junkies except him and his friend Ric, who just smoke pot and did coke. When they were teenagers, they took four of their buddies up to the country for a detox. After sitting up for 48 hous without sleep trying to helpl four junkies kick cold turkey, they developed a profound respect for addiction, but wer e no closer 6to gettting even one of thier friends off junk. Once in the city, one by one, they relapsed.

Charles, a zealous student of the Ultimate Chaotic act, had consciously followed the progress of Ibogaine since the late '70s. He was a font of reassurance and support for the project amidst indifference; he tried to use his connections on the club Scene to line up publicity and enforsements. Charles needed a treatment for his friend Jeff, a tallented interior designer who, in between being on the nod, did little carpentry jobs at the World, a club on East Houston. Charles had a dream that if he could just get Jeff off dope for a little while, they could turn the cinderblock front of his carriage house on East 5th St. into a store for his rock 'n' roll accessories.

Jeff was an industrious addict, working long hard hours to maintain $80-$100 daily heroin and almost daily cocaine use. Charlie went along for the treatment. But there was only about a gram of Ibogaine for Jeff, who was almost six feet tall and needed more. "He kept laying there saying, 'Charlie it isn't working'," Charles said later, "But I asked him--so how come you don't get up and go cop?' He couldn't!" Ten hours after taking Ibogaine, he requested a hot fudge sundae.

Following treatment, Jeff began to complain bitterly about his back. They symptoms were not related to detox, but rather a back injury which the detox had unmasked. A work-related injury had gone undiagnosed for sometime, with Jeff in effect self-medicating for a slipped disk.

The difference Ibogaine mad in Jeff was electric--the "Xanadu effect." Jeff was one of those junkies who is constantly knick-knacking, pulling antique grill and window-frames out of dumpsters and bringing them home only to have them pile up, unused. Now, in several weeks of feverish construction, all the opium dreams stopped up in Jeff's head were actualized. When the showroom was unveiled--a veritable pleasure dome--Sisko and Dana realized this was their first of a subtle new class of effects: the "Ibogaine artifact."

Perhaps as result of unmasking thge back injury, or perhaps as the result of his age--41--Jeff's post-treatment was markedly longer than most. But it was useful to find that a heroin habit could mask an underlying injury; and Sisko also noted that the recovery period seemed notably shorter the younger the individual. Jeff's alcohol consumption did decrease makedly at first; personal appearance and hygiene improved. But Jeff's loyalties were sufficiently tangled by by the contempt myany of his junkie friend had for the whole YIP trip, that after two months he relapsed, ripping off Charles in the Process. Still, a single Ibogaine treatment had put the store over the hump, and Kritsky attired the stars, including Madonna, Billy Idol, Hall & Oats, and Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam.

What would the effect be in the inner city, if all creative people currently impaired on heroin and coke were unleashed, and started small businesses?

Among the last of nine initial treatms done by Sisko in Amsterdam were a Greek theatrical couple--a director and his mate, a costume designer--who'd read a reprint of the original Overthrow article in the journal of the Greek YIPPIES. "M," the director, was addicted to both heroin and methadone. He used 50 mg.-a-day of methadone, as well as 1/4 of a gram of heroin, but rarely drank and had ceased once-frequent mushroom and LSD use.

The treatment began with routine Ibogaine symptoms.After an hour, though, "M" began vomiting. Despite the beginnings of the visionary stage, he complained of physical discomfort.Two-and-a-half hours later he asked for methadone. He was not indicating any signs of physical withdrawal, however. Under the pretext of using the bathroom, he phoned his fiancee "A" and insisted she bring him methadone at once.

When she arrived, she surrptitiously slipped the methadone to "M," who renewed his request to Sisko for methadone. Sisko refused. "M" persuasively argued he was in great discomfort--that the therapy was not working. Sisko debated the pros and cons of aborting treatment. "M" was displaying high anxiety, but still no physical symptoms of withdrawal. He continued to campaign to end the treatment. Sometime thereafter, "A" returned and slipped him 25 mg. Halcion, which he took and promptly threw up, before finally drifting off to sleep hours later.

Upon awakening, he again summoned "A" to his side and took an additional 30 mg. of methadone.
Sisko, upon learing of this, decided to terminate the treatment. In the next days, in conferences with both "M" and "A," "M" came to see that what he had experienced was an anxiety reaction, not physical withdrawal from narcotics. Sisko agreed to treat him again, but as soon as he was done treating "A."

"A" had been living in Athens, sniffing one gram of smack a day for months. She'd been using continually for three years. She had been able to observe what Ibogaine was like in "M," and was most cooperative. Her Ibogaine dose was given in two administrations, one-and-a-half hours apart. At no time did she vomit or feel nauseous. Nor did she experience any discomfort of withdrawal. She recovered quickly, and went home to join "M," who had continued to shoot heroin and do methadone. For a week she refrained from using heroin, despite being around "M's" contined use. At the end of the week, she accompanied him for his second treatment attempt, ten day after the first one.

Sisko had observed about half of his subjects become nauseaous, and half of these vomit at some time during the treatment. Therefore, "M" began by taking two dramamine. An hour later "M" ingested his dose of Ibogaine, and within 35 minutes was beginning to feel the effects. Seventy minutes after ingestion, he reeported the onset of nausea.

A booster dose of Ibogaine was administered, but "M" vomite immediately, losing the booster and some Ibogaine ingested earlier. Sisko determined that emergency measures were in order. By prior consent of "M," a rectal acqueous solution had been prepared. It was administered. Within an hour "M" was experiencing the full Ibogaine effect, being characteristically "overwhelmed." The balance of the treatment was uneventful. "M" recovered within three days, declared the procedure an overwhelming success, and moved with "A" to another city.

These treatments pin-pointed problems--such as coping with "enabling behavior" in a couple where the one who isn't being treated is slipping drugs to the one who is, as well as the urghent requirement for a better anti-nausea medication--that would have to be overcome to perfect the procedure. And there was another discovery here--Ibogaine might work, but only on the second or third try--a result that would be confirmed in animals, as we learn in the next chapter. There was one follow-up phone interview of this coupld. "M" told Sisko that he'd used heroin on just two occasions; "A" told him she had remained completely heroin-free.

All of these initial treatment episodes became the basis for Sisko's Interrupting Drug Dependency: A Summary of Nine Case Histories. With the publication of Nine Case Histories, Sisko set the stage for his next big idea--making freedom from addiction a reality for those, specifically the Dutch Junkie-bond, who'd initiated the struggle for addict rights.

Without Ibogaine, "Freedom from addiction" is just a slogan. But Sisko knew that not using Ibogaine one he had it would mean acquiescence in slavery and the perpetuation of slavery.

It was a challenge Sisko couldn't resist.

Once he was sure the interruption of addiction was real, Bob Sisko knew that he had to form an organization to make freedom from addiction a reality for addicts everywhere. The name he chose was the International Coalition for Addict Self Help (ICASH). The first ICASH treatment was of the founder of the Junkie-bond, Nico Adriaans.

Yet it was through the cases of Nico and his girlfriend that Sisko came to know as well the limits of freedom--that Ibogaine is not the cure it was first hoped to be, but a treatment. In time, both Nico and Josien relapsed into addiction, and required re-treatment. On a tape made ten months after his treatment, Nico gave a much clearer description than before to an American junkie of the religious quality of his first experience [See Chapter 8: Nico Adriaans --- where the Voice comes and says, "So if you know, act like it." , ]; and Dana upon seeing this later, asked Sisko: "How could some one relapse after such an experience?

Sisko thought about it a minute and said: "He forgot. On Ibogaine he will remember again."

Josien Harms re-counted how she became re-addicted to heroin in another tape made in February, '91, during that later round of treatments:

"The Ibogaine gives you a feeling that you want to use your brain. You want to be occupied. You want to do things. After Ibogaine, it really gives you a sense like Wow--what possibilities you have, and with heroin, it's just not possible. It puts some grip on your brain, and you're not able to use your brain fully. Maybe four months after I had taken the Ibogaine, I tried it one time and I thought, "Oh yeah, now I remember why I"m don't want to use any more." But somehow, I just tried it a few times, and six months after I took the Ibogaine I was back on, using daily again. I thought I had it under control, and that I could do that . Just take it once in a while. And now, if I do the Ibogaine again, I don't want to play around with it any more. I don't want to try, even try, if I can do that--to use once in a while. I just want to stay away from it this time. It costs too much mone y. And it's just not nice."

So even though it's not a perfect cure, through a kind of Ibogaine learning curve the possibility of freedom exists for each individual. Because through Ibogaine, unlike the ordinary addict, they have learned how to quit--later, without Ibogaine.

What is more, information made availble during the experience may lay around, and then, under the stimulus of a disinhibit ing situation, snap into focus months afterward.

During the spring of 1991 an ex-Israeli Army medic who was working with Sisko and Howard, named Boaz Wachtel, succeeded in wheedling a treament for his cigarette addiction. The treatment worked; but on Ibogaine Boaz experienced being present, 4,000 years earlier, at the offering of the Tablets, and then wandering in the desert for 40 years.

In August of '91, when Bob Sisko re-treated himself because his drinking had gotten too heavy again, Bwiti instructed him to go to a certain schul on East First Street. There he met someone with contacts in Czechoslovakia and access to an investment hous e with several million dollars to invest. The clinic in Prague didn't work out; the new Czech government was too beholden to Bush and James Baker to grant approval, but soon after the initial contact in the schul, in the Lower East Side apartment of the Czech contact, Boaz experienced one of those moments where everything seems to re-arrange --and information made available to him months before, on the Ibogaine--snapped into focus.

They were talking about a tank ditch on the Golan, between Israel and Syria, when Boaz remembered a fragment from his visions: the greening of Israel, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, even Saudi Arabia by bringing water down from lakes in Eastern Turkey vi a a series acqueducts. A review of elevation maps showed it was eminently feasible. Boaz credits Ibogaine for strengthening his conviction to act on the vision, the sense that peace in that particular corner of the world remains
somehow essential in the design of things. He went to work, and today his water-for-peace plan forms one of the few really solid bases for peace negotiations. The region has dangerously depleted its aquifers; everyone in the area needs an agreement tha t will let them share in the potential water from the north, if agreement with Syria can be reached.

One night not long after Boaz first got his Great New Idea, after he was done explaining how he felt it related to his Ibogaine experience, Sisko conceded that his own recent re-treatment "really refreshed my memories of the first time I did it. The reality of it. When you don't do it for awhile, you really forget what it's like. Did you know that I traveled anywhere in the world in a blink of an eye? It was like Astral Projection."

He went on to speculate that the effect may be somewhat dependent on place. Sisko wants to take Ibogaine at MT. Sinai, to see if he might be able to talk to Moishe Rebbineu. After another six months or so, he told Dana about a story from Numbers, Chapter 12, Verses 1-16, about Moses and Moses' sister, a story Jews are supposed to study once a year.

"It really supports the idea that dreaming was the usual medium for religious experience and prophecies," said Sisko.

Moses was married to an Ethiopian -- a Black woman. And Miriam, his sister, and Aaron started making a stink, saying "Hath the Lord indeed spoken only with Moses? Hath He not spoke also with us?" -- Sisko paused for dramatic effect -- "And the Lord heard it."

So God called Moses, Aaron, Miriam to the Meeting Tent, and descended on a pillar of cloud and said, "If there be a prophet among you, I the Lord do make myself knwn unto him in a vision, I do speak with in a dream.

"My servant Moses is not so; he is trusted in all My house; with him I do speak mouth to mouth, even manifestly, and not in dark speeches; and the similitude of the Lord doth he behold" -- in other words I talk to this guy face to face, not in dreams at night like any run-of-the-mill Prophet.

Then God said, in effect:"You have grievously hassled my Man, Moses. You want White? I'll give you White."

Ande he turned Miriam into a leper. But because God is merciful, after a week He turned her back.

"Jews don't talk about this story a lot," Sisko said, "because it involves racism, even though Miriam's primary offense was to undermine the Project, by dissing Moses."

"But the story seems to say God is against racism. That he views it as spiritual leprosy."

Since his second treatment, Sisko religiously dons his skull-cap and marches over to schul every Friday night. He is unavailable on Saturdays. He wants to go take Ibogaine on Mt. Sinai. He wants to see if he can talk to Moishe Rebbineu. But even with out that, his gadfly role, hassling the feds for proceding so ponderously with Ibogaine development, is in the highest tradition of confronting a complacent,Pharonic authority, and speaking truth to power.

He hasn't smoked a cigarette in five and a half years.

[Richard_smoker]

CHAPTER 7: Stanley Glick



In 1986, Howard Lotsof again approached the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) and asked them to put Ibogaine to the hardest test. Have your doctors, he said, give it to subjects you pick, double-blind.

"We don't really believe you," they replied, "and anyway you have to demonstrate it in the animal model."

"Animals are animals and people are people," he objected. But he realized the work would have to go forth, and he set out to do it. First Lotsof would have to get Ibogaine, and none of the European pharmaceutical giants would sell him any, unless he got European patents. So while he obtained patents in fourteen countries other than the United States, he made the trip to Libreville so he could manufacture his own Ibogaine.

When he finally got his first Ibogaine nine months later, Howard began working on data for attenuating the alcohol dependency syndrome. Here he was venturing beyond his original '62-'63 trials, so he contracted with a professor through a graduate student at McGill in Montreal to check out Ibogaine's effect on alcoholic rats. The professor turned the real work over to the same graduate student-- who turned out to be simply incapable of performing the analysis to recognize the trend that was clear in his experimental data.

"This kid could have published the first scientific paper showing abogaine's efficacy. Instead, he went with me to the bank, where I withdrew every cent I had and gave it to him. Then he said, 'You know, you really fucked me over.' Fortunately, our contract specified that I owned the data from his experiment. When I looked it over, the attenuation of alcohol consumption was clear. This guy was simply unwilling to see it."

Howard filed the patent (U.S. #4,857,523) for attentuation of alcohol dependency s yndrome, July 18, 1988. It was granted the next year, August 15, 1989.

Upon getting supplies, Howard had fired off a sample to Drug Testing Program of the College on Problems of Drug Dependency at the National Institute of Health in Maryland. In January of '88 he got back a letter from Dr. Arthur E. Jacobsen, the Chairman of the Program, reporting that the Dr. James H. Woods of the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor had determined Ibogaine was not a substitute narcotic. 69

Using in vitro (in glass, i.e., not in living animals) preparations of the brains of rats and the brain stems of mice, Woods showed Ibogaine "did not exhibit significant opioid activity."

Howard next furnished Ibogaine to researchers in the Pharmacology Department at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. E.D. Dzoljic, Charlie Kaplan and M.R. Dzoljic developed a method of injecting it into the ventricles (little spaces) of rat's brains, so that they would get the effects of regular IV or interperitoneal adminstration with a thousandth of the usual amount. For them fifty grams was like fifty kilos.

In '88, the Dutch group was the first to publish a full paper, Effect of Ibogaine on Naloxone-percipitated Withdrawal Syndrome in Chronic Morphine Dependent Rats. Live rats were addicted by implanting them with morphine pellets, then t hrown into withdrawal with naloxone (the morphine "blocker" developed in the '60s, prototype of today's longer-acting naltrexone). By injecting Ibogaine into3 the brain (intercerebroventricularly) fifteen minutes before the naloxone, withdrawal was lessened, especially signs related to locomotion (rearing, digging, jumping)--as well as head-hiding, chewing, teeth-chattering, writhing and salivation--which showed withdrawal was being blocked. The rats also had less desire to hide and to escape; the only sign that increased was penile-licking(!). Kaplan and the Dzoljics noted studies showing Ibogaine simultaneously stimulates sleeping (acetylcholine) and fight-or-flight (nor-adrenalin) brain pathways.

Now in the world of pharmaceutical giants, NDA International was an amoeba among whales ("Three officers and nine lawyers," quips Norma). It was Norma, Howard and Bruce Sakow, a commercial screen writer who was their first investor ("I've known Howard since the eary '70s," says Sakow. "When I put my money in I thought I was throwing it away. I didn't think he would get as far as he has.")

Lotsof ran out of money in 1989, after he had contracted with Dr. Stanley Glick, head of the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at Albany College of Medicine, to test whether Ibogaine would depress long-term intake of morphine in rats.

To find out, Glick trained his rats to self-inject about 75 milligrams (mg.) of morphine a day, enough to feel pleasure but not enough to be addicted. He took them off morphine on weekends: These were "casual user" rats. Each time a rat would press a l ever, they'd get .04 mg. per kilo (mg/kg) of body-weight.

Ibogaine in doses ranging from 2.5 to 80 mgs. was given either before and after the morphine on day one of the experiment. Immediately, 5 mg. of Ibogaine cut morphine intake 40 percent; 10 mg. cut it in half; 20 mg., 60 percent; and 40 mg. cut it to on e-tenth of what it was at the beginning of the experiment. But since Ibogaine causes behavioral immobility, in the first twenty-four hours water intake was also severely depressed by the time the dose reached 40 mg./kg.

What grabbed Glick's attention was the after-effect. Ibogaine goes out of the body in a few hours, but doses of 40 to 80 mg./kg. depressed intake up to several weeks! Moreover, after several weekly treatments, this after-effect kicked in with some rats who were initially resistant. Not only that, this after-effect was not aversive (a simple conditioned negative response) because it happened whether Ibogaine was given before or after the morphine on day one of the experiment.

Although Ibogaine was shown in 1956 to double the painkilling effect of morphine, that only happens for the few hours that both are in the body. Ibogaine couldn't be an antagonist,
because the rats would just have bar-pressed more morphine. Anyway, most researchers thought indole-alkaloids aren't supposed to interact with the morphine pathways at all. Glick speculated that either a long-lasting Ibogaine metabolite or some lesi oning of the brain might be involved.

Now under the terms of their contract, Dr. Glick had to send Lotsof a preliminary report. But researchers don't like to circulate anything before formal publication in a scientific journal; and to Glick's embarrassment, he says, Lotsof "sent the data to two dozen people around the world!" Glick was relieved when Lotsof couldn't pay him the rest of the money. That allowed him to break the contract, but continue Ibogaine research with his regular block grants from NIDA.

His next experiment (summarized inInteractions between Ibogaine, an potential anti-addictive agent, and morphine: an in vivo microdialysis study , with I.M. Maisonneuve and R.W. Keller, Jr.) used probes set in the skulls of living rats to colle ct minute amounts of a neurotransmitter called dopamine (DA), to track the effect of Ibogaine on the morphine high.

Dopamine makes your "pleasure centers" do their thing; when one neuron fires off dopamine to the next neuron, it feels good. It also triggers locomotion. In Parkinson's disease the dopamine
system shuts down, causing paralysis.

Cocaine produces a surplus of DA in the intersynaptic space by occupying a slot on the protein "transporter" that carries DA back into the neuron for re-use. Morphine, nicotine, and booze increase the neuronal firi ng rate. Amphetamine increases DA release directly. But take away your usual drug (except for marijuana, which keys into a completely different network atop the brain) and you'll feel listless, anhedonic (no pleasure) and even the pangs of acute withdrawal.

The common denominator effect of all these drugs is chronic DA surplus in the mesocortical or mesolimbic system, i.e., where dopamine pathways project either into the pre-frontal cortex (decision-making), or a little bulb called the nucleus accumbens (sexual pleasure, movement). or further back in the occiput, into the striated cortex, the striatum (visualization). In the standard model of addiction, visualization in the striatum (a) triggers craving in the nucleus accumbens, (b) which sets up a dopiminergic cascade of further visualizations and cravings that finally trip the dopamine switch in the pre-frontal cortex, (c) initiating drug-taking.

Glick, Maisonneuve, et al. sought to determine first, what Ibogaine alone does to extra-cellular DA and its metabolites, DOPAC (3,4 dihydroxyphenacetic acid) and HVA (homovanillic acid)? Next, how does morphine by itself, 5 mg. and 30 mg., effect all three regions? Finally, what does Ibogaine pre-treatment nineteen hours prior to 5 mg. of morphine [by which time the Ibogaine--with a "half life" in the body of one hour, according to Dhahir--is certainly gone] do to the dopamine release and behav ioral change that normally come with a 5 mg. per kilogram dose of morphine?

Acutely (i.e., right away) Ibogaine decreased DA in the striatum, increased it in the pre-frontal cortex, had no effect in the nucleus accumbens.* But the metabolite DOPAC increased in all three areas; HVA increased in the striatum and nucleus accumbens.

On the other hand, the lower five mg. dose of morphine kicked up DA and its metabolites in all three regions; while 30 milligrams increased not dopamine but the metabolites. [On the graph it looks like the entire increase shifts into metabolites.]

After Ibogaine pre-treatment, 5 mgs. of morphine failed to raise DA levels in the three regions. Instead there was a rise in metabolites similar to 30 mgs. of morphine with no Ibogaine pre-treatment, (except in the neo-cortex, where DOPAC stayed flat and HVA increase was de layed and smaller).

Likewise, 5 mgs. of morphine by itself inhibited motor activity for 40 minutes, followed by a burst of excitement. But in pre-treated rats there was no excited period, just an inhibitory phase (of two hours) much like 30 mgs. of morphine (three hrs). Was a long-lasting metabolite of Ibogaine potentiating the morphine, so that a 5 mg. dose had the same effect as a 30 mg. dose? Or was a neurotoxic effect damaging some DA neurons while increasing firing of the remaining ones? The second possibility seemed ruled out by Dhahir's '71 study, in which rats treated for thirty days with 10 to 30 mg./kg. of Ibogaine showed no neuronal damage.

With 5 mgs. of morphine, increased motor activity matched a rise in striatal dopamine (80 % of DA receptors are in the striatum). Glick concluded that the30 mg./kg. dose somehow additional opioid sites were being activated, blocking striatal DA release.

With Ibogaine treatment, DA release was also down. Since Glick found the same morphine level (5 mg./kg.) in the control group, this meant neither Ibogaine nor a longlasting metabolite was prolonging morphine half life. Morphine was still firing off DA, but it was turning into metabolites DOPAC and HVA instead of hanging out. Glick did know that by preventing a DA surplus in the nucleus accumbens, Ibogaine could decrease morphine's "reinforcing effect."

Glick's group followed this up with the most complex set of tests yet, trucking in radioactive samples (radio-ligands) of Ibogaine and its closest relatives to find whether the reduction of morphine intake was specific to Ibogaine, or if '60s psychedelic researchers had missed a general effect of a number of indole-ring compounds. Glick chose Ibogaine HCI, ibogamine, tabernanthine, corinaridine, harmaline HCI, harmane HCI, and harmine HCI.

Published later as Mechanisms of action of Ibogaine and Harmaline cogeners based on radioligand binding studies , the experiments aimed to answer three questions: Was Ibogaine locking into one of the opiate receptors? Does the hallucinogenic effect involve the serotonin (5 HT) receptors? And third, iboga and harmala alkaloids produce tremor (slight shaking)--how? For comparison purposes, drugs were used with known affinities for thirty different kinds of brain receptor including dopamine, se ratonin, adrenalin and opiates, but also GABA, cannabinoid, CI (since Ibogaine HCI is a chloride salt), benzodiazapine (BZD) and several others.

There were some big surprises. Lack of affinity for serotonin receptors showed that iboga and harmala indolealkalamines--even though they share an indole ring--are fundamentally different from the LSD series. As for tremor, it wasn't happening in the GABA receptor; nor was chloride uptake being blocked at the BZD (valium) receptor. Instead all the harmala and iboga compounds were conductively--i.e, neuro-electrically--firing via the sodium channels.

But the real find was that all the iboga compounds--and none of the harmala ones--had a transient affinity for the KAPPA-opiate receptor. But only transient--one rinse of the homogenized brain tissue used in the experiment freed it up for any competing chemical. By comparison, buprenorphin, which cannot be blocked by naloxone once it is administered, gives up its hold on opiate receptors most reluctantly. Ibogaine's long-lasing effect doesn't come by locking out opiates. It does just enough to block wi thdrawal 95 percent, but leave the addict something to overcome. Once again it was shown to be neither a substitute narcotic nor an antagonist (blocker).

Glick was now completely hooked on Ibogaine research. He converted one-third of his lab to his own mini-Staten Island project, spending a few hundred thousand in NIDA block grants.

Next Glick studied Ibogaine and D-amphetamine (remember "dexies"?), since amphetamine produces dopamine surplus via the most straightforward route (increased release, versus increased neuronal firing rate on morphine, etc.). Rats will inject amphetamine directly into the nucleus accumbens. Also, lesioning there decreases amphetamine-induced DA release and hyperactivity.

Nineteen hours after the pre-treatment, dopamine levels were back to nor-mal; but both metabolites (DOPAC, HVA) were still down. When D-amphetamine was given, DA levels were doubled in both the nucleus accumbens and striatum of pre-treated rats, while metabolites decreased. Pre-treatment also increased locomotion across a broad range of doses, and after the first hour, made it peak sooner.

How, if pre-treatment doubled DA release, and DA causes the pleasure that makes drugs addictive, could Ibogaine interrupt amphetamine abuse? The answer lies in the well-known unpleasant " wasted" feeling produced by too much amphetamine. As Glick said later in Interactions of ibogaine and D-amphetamine: in vivo microdialysis and motor activity in rats (with I.M. Maisonneuve and R.W. Keller, Jr.), released DA activates other autoreceptors, so that one too-hig h dose can produce an averse reaction to subsequent low doses.

How? Glick proposed Ibogaine might do this by sensitizing the neurons, or via his elusive "long-lasting Ibogaine metabolite."

Next Glick's group went back to measure, more exactly, what happens with dopamine and behavior when morphine is given one hour, nineteen hours, one week and one month after Ibogaine pre-treatment. As explained in Acute and Prolonged effects of Iboga ine on brain dopamine metabolism and morphine-induced locomotor activity in rats , they first recorded the effects of morphine on locomotion. Then, instead of teasing traces of DA and its metabolites from between the neurons with dialysis, this time they killed the rats and determined total DA tissue content.

The first mystery solved was how DOPAC and HVA are depressed nineteen hours after pre-treatment: within an hour of Ibogainization, dopamine fell a whopping 54 % in the pre-frontal cortex, 51% in the nucleus accumbens, and 42 % in the striatum (where 80 % of DA receptors reside). Nineteen hours later, DOPAC was still at 85% of normal in the nucleus accumbens and 83% in the striatum; the pre-frontal cortex was normal. Aweek after Ibogaine, striatial DOPAC was still 90 % of normal. (Glick was so surprised he checked this finding twice.) After a month, everything was normal.

Now Ibogaine itself inhibits motor activity, but only during the first hour. A week after Ibogaine Glick's rats were more active, which indicates the initial DA drop wasn't a result of simple lesioning--say of the nucelus accumbens. But even after a week, Ibogaine (40 mg./kg.) depressed morphine's behavioral stimulation, except at the high dose of 30 mg./kg. Since his second study (Interactions between Ibogaine and Morphine) found expected DA release was depressed in the striatum, but not the nucleus accumbens (which is thought to govern movement), Glick could only speculate the absence of stimulation might result from striatally-induced morphine rigidity. [The alternative explanation--inhibition of visualization in the triggering of craving--is harder to check out in rats. But he was also inclined to see visualizations as an undesirable side effect of Ibogaine therapy.] At one month later, the inhibition of morphine effect finally wore off.

Yet if the second study recorded no 50 % DA release, and only moderate metabolite increase (HVA), where was the dopamine going? Ibogaine action on voltage-dependent sodium channels could release a little, and block re-uptake a bit, but that doesn't account for 50 %! Perhaps DOPAC decrease at nineteen hours could result from new DA being diverted into storage pools. But to fully explain it, Glick was left either with his elusive, and now very long-lasting, metabolite or "persistent neuronal change."

Finally, Maisonneuve and Glick tried out Ibogaine on cocaine. Repeating the combo of micro-dialysis and measurement of behavioral stimulation, they found that cocaine challenge (i.e., fresh administration) nineteen hours after pre-treatment boosted and lengthened the usual DA release in the nucleus accumbens, and to a lesser extent, in the striatum. Behavioral stimulation was increased only in the second hour, but that might be because the rats were not yet habituated to cocaine. They could only begin to be habituated in the second hour, when the motor enhancement corresponds to the first point of the cocaine "crash," where the user typically becomes uncomfortable and hyperstimulated.

In Interactions between ibogaine and cocaine in rats: in vivo microdialysis and motor behavior , Maisonneuve and Glick noted the effect would be the same as a higher-than-intended dose of cocaine--anxiety-producing, ergo, aversive. Just like amphetamine. Of course, how Ibogaine pre-treatment could increase DA release with amphetamine while blocking DA re-uptake with cocaine, was as big a mystery of how pre-treatment could work at all when Ibogaine is completely out of the body after nineteen hours.

Glick now leaned toward the "long-lasting metabolite" hypothesis. If he could find it, and patent it, it would do everything Ibogaine does sans psychedelic effect. And as Dr. Marvin Snyder of NIDA told a NEWSDAY reporter in the summer of 1990: "We're n ot looking at any drugs with psychedelic effects [for treatment of drug dependency]."

To be fair, as a veteran NIDA grantsman, Glick was aware Ibogaine had powerful adversaries in high places. He was aware Ibogaine had been plugged in the first draft of a 1989 Senate Judiciary Report on new medications for drug dependen-cy, but was drop ped from the final draft because Dr. Thomas Kosten and another doctor from Yale wrote a letter objecting that it's an "herbal." (Actually, Howard now gets synthetic 99.7 percent pure Ibogaine from Omnichem in Belgium.)

The centerpiece of the report? Buprenophine, which doesn't work that well, and is addictive...but was developed by Kosten and Herb Kleber. So where Glick told NEWSDAY in 1990 that "lying on your back for two days would be a small price to pay" if Ibo gaine worked, by October 16, 1991, he told the ALBANY TIMES-UNION, "It is doubtful Ibogaine could ever be marketed because of its psychoactive properties and the muscle tremor." He opined that they'd probably wait ten years to develop a synthetic. Glick needed NIDA grants to do anything, and Herb Kleber was Deputy Drug Czar.

To Lotsof and his supporters, the visualization or "waking REM" (Rapid Eye Movement, as in dreaming) effect was integral to Ibogaine's efficacy. Howard says this phase, which only lasts four-to-five hours, enables the addict to dredge up all kinds of traumatic material while in a "neutral cognitive state," and is essential to their "maturing out of addiction." Certainly, there's no way to learn how important waking REM is by studying rats, mice or monkeys.

"Originally our critics told us no medication can get at the deep psychological roots of addiction," says Howard. "Well, you certainly can't affect those roots without getting at them.

"They want crops without plowing up the ground... rain without thunder and lightning. They want the Ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."

Gradually, though, Lotsof has become reconciled with Glick. In February 1990, when he got more good news from Jacobsen of the Committee on Problems of Drug Dependence, he made certain Glick was first to know. Drs. Aceto, Bowman and Harris of the Medic al College of Virginia had performed research showing that Ibogaine does not cause significant physical dependence. Here was independent confirmation Ibogaine had at least one characteristic of a true addiction interrupter.

On April 30, 1991, Dr. Stanley Glick gave a one-hour lecture, with slides, at Mt. Sinai Hospital--as a courtesy, since personnel there had been instrumental in introducing him to Lotsof in 1986. As a courtesy, Howard, Bob Sisko and Dana Beal were all i nvited. They sat there as Glick presented an overwhelming profusion of charts, graphs and statistics, a slick show on his phase of the Staten Island Project. But his principal findings were simple:

*Ibogaine is neither a substitute narcotic nor a crude mechanical blocker like naltrexone.

*Iboga, but not other indoleakalamines, temporarily bind to the KAPPA-opiate receptor, enough to ameliorate withdrawal but not enough that the addict feelsno withdrawal whatsoever.

* Ibogaine depressed morphine intake in all but one of twelve rats who were not addicted, but were self-injecting for pleasure. Ibogaine decreases, but does not extinguish, pleasure response.

* Through the same mysterious mechanisms Ibogaine boosted amphetamine and cocaine effect in a way that could be anxiogenic, "aversive" in addicts upon first trying coke or amphetamines after treatment.

When the hour was up, and Glick was done, Howard Lotsof walked up to him and said: "Listening to your presentation, viewing your data, I felt like I was present when Enrico Fermi initiated the first nuclear reaction under the Stadium at the University of Chicago."

[Richard_smoker]

CHAPTER 8: Nico Adriaans

At the beginning of Glick's presentation, he threw in a slide he considered to be a gag: a headline from an article in the VILLAGE VOICE, entitled: MIRACLE CURE ? Advocates say Ibogaine Ends Craving for Dope. The article was Dana's first big score in a new role: public point-man for Ibogaine. It had taken him thirteen months of prodding the VOICE to get it printed, since the day in late May 1989, when a hotshot freelancer named Max Cantor walked in at #9 Bleecker, aiming to do a big expose on the furious controversy in the annual pot parade between Dana's people and a cabal of Lower East Side squatters who'd been in the news a lot sinceteplce riot in Tompkns Squa Par the Agust before. They claimed to speak in the higher interest of the Parade/Movement, but due to entanglement with a 12-step faction in the squat scene vehemently opposed to Ibogaine, and the fact that some of them now owed their apartments to the eviction of addicts, their opposition to making an issue of Ibogaine hardened. They would rather evict junkies than turn them into non-addicts. But they didn't feel confident to pull off such a bald-faced coup without a figurehead--Michael Caesar, the self-styled "Pope of Pot."

For ten years, the "Pope" had a simple but effective way of glomming all the column inches available for pot coverage in the New York papers: Open up a marijuana delivery service; offer all the younger anarchists jobs (without the political demands they'd be subjected to at #9, where they were forbidden to deal pot). Let them do hard drugs (Fred was the Pope's lieutenant for years; all his earnings went into his arm.) Then go public in unfriendly media like the NEW YORK POST, get busted, and take all the delivery boys to jail with you.

So Dana said to Max: "Why write the same stupid article the NEW YORK POST has run four times already--when you can do a real scoop? Let me tell you about the real issue behind the split--Ibogaine."

The roots of the split actually went back to 1987, when Dana was sitting in the D.C. NORML office talking to the new National Director, John Getman. "Can't you do something about Charlie Rangel?" asked Getman, referring to the head of the House Select Sub-Committee on Narcotics. "We can't budge him."

"Well," said Dana, "the only time we have enough people to do anything is the annual pot parade. It's a schlep fromWashington Square Park, but we could take a rest in Central Park, and have 't end up at Rangel's office on 125th Street."

When the first Saturday in May rolled around, though, the bulk of the parade wouldn't go past Strawberry Fields at 72nd and Central Park West. Legalizing pot wasn't really a political goal for them. The parade was an annual occasion to party.

When the political vanguard of the parade did get to Rangel's office at 125th, they were confronted by a fat white lady police community relations officer and about eight black activists she'd assembled, who were fuming over this invasion of their turf . In a twinkling Dana saw they wouldn't be into a hemp rap. But except for the white lady cop, they were all very interested in an African rain forest cure for addiction.

The problem was that Dana was implementing a "paradigm shift" here before most of the movement even knew about Ibogaine. By the time he finished revising a book on environmental hemp in February '88 (which started out in 1983 as Hans-Georg Behr's VON HANF IST DIE REDE --"When the Subject is Hemp"--and metamorp hosed along the way into THE EMPEROR WEARS NO CLOTHES, by Jack Herer), he'd realized the purely environmental approach left out all the really good public health arguments. After all, there was now had the experience of twelve years of de-crim in Holland to go on. So he phoned George in Hamburg, who told him all drug reform during the next period was going to be driven by the AIDS crisis.

So Dana started going to ACT UP.

As far back as 1986 Beal and the grassroots caucus recommended to the Greens that they approach AIDS activists re medical marijuana, since Chinese medicine, which calls cannabis the Empress of Herbs, specifies it for treating immune disorders. For his trouble, Dana was denounced within the New York Greens in three letters in early '87 sent to 200 people, including three City Councilpersons. [A few months later Dana was busted for pot. All the files of the Impeach Reagan/Bush Campaign were confiscated b y a joint federal-state task force, aborting protests outside Oliver North's appearance at the Iran-Contral committee, leaving the field clear to pro- Ollie demonstrators.

To add insult to injury, Abbie then told Dana the environmentalists who'd sn itched Beal out wouldn't let him talk to Dana anymore. Beal was placed on five years of probation on marijuana charges in August 1987. He never talked to Abbie again longer than to say "Hello."]

Dana attended his first ACT UP meeting in early April '88 as an unabashed "Safe Drugs" advocate of what the Dutch call "harm reduction," i.e., "reducing the harms involved with drugs. Ever since the '60's, he'd backed legalizing pot as a means of market separation of pot and hard drugs. By 1988, though, he'd also come to see the Dutch model of separate hash cafes as more do-able than outright legalization. He came to ACT UP hoping to get some ACT UP participation in the annual May parade. But he was shocked to see how many people he knew in ACT UP from Studio 10 days. The whole Bruce Brown generation was starting to drop dead of AIDS. But to ACT UP cynics, all the well-reasoned "Safe Drugs" manifestos of market-separation (which decreased new hard drugs addiction in Holland 40 %) and clean needles (which kept AIDS among i.v. drug u sers there at 2%, versus 67 % in New York City and Newark) only confirmed Dana's status as an outsider who just wanted to push pot.

In 1988, the ACT UP i.v.-drug user interest group wouldn't even intervene to save NYC's pilot needle exchange program. It was firmly under the control of twelve-step drug-free types led by Richard Elovitch. When Chuck Eaton of the pilot Koch program came to them begging for support against Dinkin's order shutting him down, they told him they considered clean needles to be "enabling addiction." After his experience in the Greens, Dana made a mental note: For two years he would furnish no pot to anyone he met through ACT UP; he advised them to grow their own.

Anyone can join ACT UP by coming to three general meetings. If you don't cultivate the support of substantial portion of the floor, though, your proposals don't go anywhere. Because a former roommate of Mitch Halberstadt named Steve Ault had vouched f or YIP's service in the gay movement, Dana was befriended by ACT UP founder Marty Robinson. But the first time Dana brought up Ibogaine to the floor as a means of interrupting addiction and the spread of AIDS, Marty came to him and warned him he could get ejected if he did it again. Ibogaine was much more offensive to the twelve-step faction than methadone. Methadone had no credibility: it's addictive, whereas with just one treatment Ibogaine offers a 40 %t chance of complete recovery without depen dency on a twelve-step group for the rest of your life. Just one treatment.

But Dana is stubborn. In 1989, in the aftermath of Abbie's suicide (due to a combination of cocaine and prozac), he decided to bypass Central Park and go straight to Fifth Aveue to Rangel's office. Pope Mickey, backed by anarchists who charged Dana had forsaken pot legalization in favor of mere de-crim, [allegedly because he owned stock in Ibogaine !?] diverted the first one-fourth and the last half of the parade to Sheep's Meadow, a quiet zone where there couldn't be any sound equipment anyway-- no rally. But the Pope had promised a pound of good weed if they could divert the parade to Sheep's Meadow, and he was only interested in passing out the dial-a-joint number.

Dana responded by getting more into ACT UP, publishing a pamphlet entitled, "What Is the Safe Drugs Movement?" (with Mitch Halberstadt and Father Frank Morales, the squatter priest) which introduced Ibogaine into the context of Dutch harm reduction. But Ibogaine detractors made him so controversial that people from the Parade and ACT UP both were afraid of being blackballed for working with him. So when, in December 1989, Dana and Marty Robinson co-sponsored a "Safe Drugs" Conference up at 137th St. at City College with Dr. John Morgan, nobody fr om ACT UP came, and only a few people attended from the marijuana movement. (There was also a cold snap that weekend, and power on IRT the subway went out.)

The conference did endorse a new plan: the May 1990 Parade would start at Rangel's Spanish Harlem offices (at East 109th) and come down town, stopping at the Partnership for a Drug Free America (666 Third Avenue), and ending up at Washington Square P ark. But the confab had another, unanticipated benefit: Dr. Morgan was Chairman of the CCNY Pharmacology Dept. He gave the assignment of seeing if Ibogaine would in fact interrupt drug dependency to his workaholic colleague Pat Broderick, a crack rat scientist.

Now cocaine makes you high more by blocking out negative feedback (perhaps this is related to blocking dopamine re-uptake) than by sensitizing you to positive feedback as LSD does. This is a tremendous problem when you get into a syndrome like sex-for-crack, because crackheads become numb to useful negative feedback, say-- like soreness in the mucous membranes of the genitals. As old hippies say, "Numb is dumb."

With re-uptake blocked, your neurons can't produce another squirt of dopamine; and soon a couple of other neurotransmitters, nor-epinephrin (which makes you irritable and paranoid) and serotonin (which makes you more awake--aware of how paranoid and ir ritable you are) come crashing back, just when you feel like your plug has been pulled because your synapses can't get up a squirt of DA.

Presto: the cocaine crash. You can solve this, temporarily, with another hit of crack. But each time makes it worse. Women who trade sex for crack may do it with twenty different partners a night, and since their negative feedback loops are out, they' re indifferent to the need for condoms. Anyway, a condom costs more than a hit of crack.

This is very bad for the AIDS crisis.

In a little more than a year, Dr. Broderick would come back with tantalizing news: in her lab rats, Ibogaine was restoring dopamine in cocaine-habituated rats to normal levels, without depressing them completely, which would cause anhedonia (no pleasu re at all) and paralysis.

Dana's next move, just after Christmas '89, was to fly to Hamburg. Dana had already spoken to Hans-Georg Behr about Ibogaine when George stayed at #9 in late 1983, trying to find a publisher for his hemp book. Now Beal told George it was time to move I bogaine to the top of the agenda in Germany.

George's political party, the Green Alternative Liste, controlled the Hamburg state government in coalition with the socialists. In Germany, like Holland and Switzerland, doctors have the right to use experimental therapies without govern-ment approval . George agreed to get the Hamburg Health Ministry to sponsor clinical trials. But somehow with the fall of East Germany (where George discovered indications the communists did their own Ibogaine trials in humans from '85-88) approval was held up on the federal level, perhaps under U.S. prodding in the context of the overall trade-off for the absorption of the Eastern states.

Back in the U.S., Dana kept trying to get the VOICE to publish Max Cantor's article. As the months went by, Max had to write three major updates. One that was never used was devoted to an attempt to get the badboy of Rock 'n' Roll, Johnny Thunders, to take Ibogaine. Thunders had approached Dana about doing his new single one the homeless at the annual RAR concert. But Dana, who was in touch with the whole scene of junkie musicians through John Spacely, refused to barge in a change the schedule unless Johnny backed Ibogaine--say, by being treated.

Thunders said yes, at first. But at the initial meeting with Sisko and Howard, he balked--he thought Ibogaine would be too much like LSD, which he didn't like. He and Stive Bators and Cheetah were allon mucho methadone. By exaggerating his heroin habit, Cheetah claimed to have talked a program into giving him enough to get a full opiate high.

Spacely, on the other hand, was totally off smack, doing grat on pot. HIs giant Cartoon likeness, smoking a cigarette, was on a wall on St. Mark's place--an ad for Lech's movie, Gringo, which had premiered in the mid-80's. Spacely constantly encouraged John Holmstrom and other Punk magazine alumnae who now put out High Times to run more about Ibogaine.

But the Voice still wouldn't print Max's story. To ratchet up the pressure, Beal had his friend Charlie Kritsky get an Ibogaine story published by the competition--THE VILLAGE BEAT. And knowing another VOICE writer was pushing yet another story (the same tired story) on Pope Michael, and that the VOICE prefers to throw coverage to advertizers, Dana thoughtfully purchased a large ad for the Safe Drugs Parade May 5. He knew that Pope Mickey was only interested in free advertising for dial-a-joint. The ad specified the parade began with an Ibogaine rally at Rangel's office.

Yet the breakthrough came from one of the synchronicities that crop up regularly when Ibogaine is involved. On the morning of May 5, 1990, a few hours before the Safe Drugs Parade (going downtown) passed the Marijuana Parade (going uptown) at 42nd Street, Bob Sisko did his most important treatment yet: the founder of the Dutch junkie liberation movement. And videotaped it.

One day some months earlier Nico Adriaans, a community field worker for the Addiction Research Center was talking to Charlie Kaplan, the head of the center, which is part of Erasmus University in Rotterdam. And Kaplan mentioned Ibogaine. A little later, Nico was putzing around Kaplan's desk, and he came across A Summary of Nine Case Histories , by Bob Sisko. Nico was fascinated, because besides being a salaried government worker, he was also an addict, doing three-fourths of a gram of high-g rade Dutch heroin a day. In fact, Nico was the founder of the Dutch Junkiebond (union), with a role parallel to Dana's as founder of the marijuana movement in the United States.

So he asked Kaplan, What about this Ibogaine? Can you get any? Do you have to go to the States? And one day at the end of April 1990, he had an appointment with Sisko, which he didn't know about, but was made by Charlie. And he told Sisko how, after the Dutch had acheived civil rights for potheads in 1976, the mayors of the four big cities in Holland--Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the Hague and Utrich--in 1979 came up with a proposal for forced therapy for heroin addicts. When they had to back down because of the outcry from civil liberties advocates, the mayors amended their proposal to lock in the kids who were using.

Nico's background was organizing the other kids when he was in an orphanage, so he was against that also. He and some other friends on the junkie street scene put out a leaflet and got almost 100 addicts together for the founding meeting of the Junkie Bond. At the meeting they wrote down ideas for a manifesto for junkie liberation, and a separate bill of rights. And they composed a telegram, which they sent to the mayors, telling them the plan for civil commitment of users was unacceptable.

They began to crash meetings and hearings, to pressure city councils and the Health Ministry. But the cops still harassed the junkies, because in those days the dominant idea was still, as in the United States today, that you have to hound the addict, so he can't feel safe and secure. First you have to break them down so they're on the street as prostitutes or thieves--so they will "bottom out" sooner, andthen they will accept your therapy (which is so lame to begin with that it's the last thing they would choose to do voluntarily).

Yet unlike junkies in the United States, who have historically aligned themselves with wealth or power or at least a cop in order to make a separate deal for themselves, the Junkie Bond made an alliance with the squatters movement. The squatters were very knowledgeable about real estate, and they had found out certain members of the Dutch criminal underworld had made a lot of money on heroin, and decided to get out of "the business" and into real estate. To wash the money, white as snow, they employed the services of a certain Schlauffenberg's Bank.

So the junkies and the squatters got together and xeroxed the brightly colored Dutch currency into black and white (black money), and made up little bags of salt and talcum powder, which looked just like bags of dope. After tipping off the media, about 100 people went to the headquarters of the Schlauffenberg's Bank and went running through the lobby and the halls throwing the little bags and the black money up in the air.

A funny thing happened. A few days later there was a big police raid on the headquarters building of the Schlauffenberg's Bank. The cops found all sorts of illegal things, double books, proof of money-laundering. The Bank officers were all busted, but of course, not one of them did a single day in jail. After that, however, someone told the police to lay off the street junkies, and life became somewhat more tolerable.

At a certain point there were about twenty-five Junkie Bond locals in Holland, and a few in Germany, in Frankfurt and so-on. The first needle-exchange was set up by these groups, in 1981, to fight the spread of hepatitis. The first AIDS education in th e world was done by these groups. They formed an organization of parents of users; and from all the clergy, lawyers and social do-gooders who became involved, the Broad Front for the Reform of Drug Policy.

The government even gave the Junkie Bond a subsidy of 25,000 guilders a year. But as Dutch government employees, they were of course expected to get off dope. Because of international pressure, Dutch authorities still sought to de-tox methadone clients instead of giving them as much as they wanted. One of the first things the Junkie Bond did was to write a Black Book of the experiences of thirty-fix methadonians, how they were forced to cut down, etc. The struggle of the '80s was pretty much to get the freedom to use.

Why, in this most liberal of all societies, would Nico Adriaans be looking for a better way to quit?

Cold turkey is the junkie's regular companion, just as junk sickness is a part of their mornings. When the monkey on your back turns into a 600-pound gorilla, you have to cold turkey just to be able to afford your habit. Nico had tried to quit many times, but he couldn't take withdrawal for long: "First you go on a holiday; then you think, 'Just five more minutes,' then you say, 'Shit, it's for the fishes.'"

By the time he saw Sisko's Nine Case Studies he was simply tired--really tired --of dope. "It's not the running, because I hardly run. It's not the stealing; I didn't steal. It's not the dope, 'cause I liked the dope--I had good time with it, bad times--but I just don't like it anymore."

So that he would know what to expect, Sisko had him read BWITI: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa , by James F. Fernandez, especially Chapter 18, on the normal experience of initiates who eat the raw root bark of the Ta bernanthe iboga bush in Gabon.

The night before his treatment, he did up his last shot, about 150 milligrams of 50 %-pure Dutch heroin. Then he didn't eat anything in the morning, he just had a little tea. Soon after the allergy dose (10 mg.), Nico did the first half of his Ibogaine, and within ten minutes recognized (as an LSD veteran) the first little vibrations. After the second half of his dose, thirty minutes later, he became aware that he no longer had any junk sickness. He noticed the edges of objects beginning to oscillate. He w as just asking for a cup of coffee when he became slightly confused; then suddenly his mind cleared: he knew.

"Certain sounds would suddenly become like synthesized voices," he said later, "and I felt sea legs. So I went to bed, behind the curtain, trying to meet my ancestors... And then at a certain moment I lost all control of time, and it really banged into my head."

He experienced the sensation of cosmic impact (but not pain) that the Bwiti call "the splitting of the skull." And the visualizations began: "On the surface of my eyes, the moisture, like the surface of a bubble, started running all over each other, becoming blue, yellow, becoming blue, yellow, depending on how thick the tears were. And I laid down on the bed--very easy--and the people around me were very encou raging, understanding."

But the rush was the most overwhelming of his life: "There you are--O God, O God, O God, God, God. Oh, man! What an experience, Ibogaine!" Behind the curtain, the room was darkened. "On the walls I saw things that could remember me on the original tradition, as how I have read it: in the images I saw, [archetypes] like the woman in the tent, the Priest...and it's hard to explain, because you don't know [in the Gnostic sense] anything anymore [now that you've come down] but I am certain...I be introduced by, by--shit!--by the Bwiti..."

Just to Whom he had difficulty even articulating, until interviewed again, nine months later, in Feb '91:

"At the end of the visions, I really had, the only way how I can describe it is I had a meeting with God, or the Supreme Being.

"There was clouds. And it was blue. And then, up there somewhere, some sort of a rectangle opened up. And there came a lot of light... And all the time increasing, increasing, increasing... And it felt like, you know, there's something impressive ther e.

"And then a Voice came to me, and said to me, asked: 'Do you KNOW , now?'

"And I only could say (lowering voice): 'Yes, I know now.'

"And then the Voice said: 'So you know !' in a way it would say, like, 'So you know ; ACT like it!'"

Then there came a long phase where the visualizations were less and less, but he still thought a lot about those things; and then a period of nausea, but not like cold turkey, "which feels like your stomach is being scratched out," but more like the purgative effects of the Ibogaine.

Finally, when the trip was mostly over, he experienced a bit of withdrawal--hot and cold flashes, sweat--but no running nose, no diarrhea, intestinal contractions or muscle clamps. Said Nico: "You're still not totally in control of your body, your legs don't want to move; you have to turn around in your bed all the time; you want to be left alone, you still don't want to talk."

Most of all Nico is amazed, when Sisko interviews him on video, when he realizes two and a half days have gone by and he feels no need to go out and score dope.

He relishes the taste of a cup of coffee. He's been up for forty-eight hours, and yawning, so he tries to steady himself with a cigarette. And after one drag, he tries to spit the taste out of his mouth and throws it out the window!

The tobacco tastes terrible. It's sickening. Nicotine and heroin, remember, have exactly the same effect on dopamine receptors (increased rate of neuronal firing--Glick). With Nico's tobacco "tolerance" stripped away, nicotine is sickening enough to overwhelm any pleasurable tobacco taste. His pattern of rolling a cigarette whenever he starts to fiddle with his hands is undisturbed. The nicotine lives up to his expectation that it will "focus' him to finish the interview (indeed, with a single drag, much less than usual). But Nico has inadvertently kicked cigarettes, despite only intending to quit heroin.

Not only that, during his truncated withdrawal, his girlfriend came, and they made a date for him to slip out and do some dope. But at the appointed time he couldn't summon up that familiar craving he'd been using to organize his daily existence for all of his adult life: "The Ibogaine let me stay in the bed.... I couldn't want to go out."

Four times he repeats parts of a poem, by Ginpo Zenzi, which exactly expresses the futility of fighting withdrawals with dope:

"It is a simple fact:

Whatever you resist, will persist.

If you are resisting suffering, you suffer more.

If you are trying to deny your confusion, you remain confused.

If you are striving for peace ,you find yourself constatly disturbed.

If you are seeking after clarity, you are in a muddle.

If you do not want to be angry, you are going to walk around angry.

If you do not mind being angry, you will never be bothered by anger.

Because you will constantly be pushing it away.

Having no options, For or Against,

Just being open to whatever comes,

You are free."

He cautioned that Ibogaine is an ordeal; but as to whether it should be developed as a cure for addiction, Nico said: "Yes."

"I think that drug use...is a part of humanity. Throughout the history of mankind, over the whole globe, all continents, every people, every nation--has, have had--and is developing new drugs, or mind-altering states. And so I think it is very important, what you have done now here in my case, to write a good report, about how you recruited, who you met, what the problems were. "

Nico was a convert. He took to wearing dashikis and studying Jung. And Sisko left him with a small supply of Ibogaine. After treating Josien Harms, his girlfriend, the two of them decided to put Ibogaine to the hardest test. What would happen if they gave Ibogaine to worst-case junkies in Amsterdam's Central Railroad Station, with no Bwiti information, no orientation beyond "Take this, it will stop withdrawal."?

They gave it to a methadonian couple who were doing heroin also. The man was doing 180 milligrams of methadone a day (three times the normal U.S. dose). The woman believed she was possessed by devils, and was on anti-psychotic medication for that. At f irst Howard was disappointed when he heard the man was still on 30 milligrams of methadone after Ibogaine.

"Au contraire," said Nico.

"The people running the methadone program had never seen anyone go from 180 to 30 milligrams in one jump. It would be fatal. Best of all, the woman discontinued thorazine. She no longer believes she is possessed by devils."

Nico and Josien went on to spread the gospel of Ibogaine throughout the junkie liberation scene of Europe, although they found 70 % of the movement considered it to be a diversion from the basic goal of legalizing heroin. But back in the Unite d States, the videotape of Nico's treatment, which Dana spent months laboriously re-editing, turned out to be the key that unlocked support among both AIDS activists and the legalization movement. Dana sent hundreds of copies of it all over the world.

One of the first to see it, raw and unedited in Sisko's living room, was the VOICE writer Max Cantor. Now he really started hassling his editors, and the combination of that pressure and the purchase of a VOICE ad for the May 5th Safe Drugs de mo, led on June 4, 1990, to the production of MIRACLE CURE.. It was Dana's first big media score for Ibogaine, and he scarcely cared that Max, for "balance," repeated the anarchist canard that he owned "hundreds of thousands of dollars in Ibogain e stock."

[Hundreds of thousands of stock in a company with a capitalization at the time of $600,000 would leave nothing for the twenty-six actual investors! In truth, Dana realized in 1988 that stock ownership would undermine his effectiveness as a public heal th advocate, just as taking Ibogaine would open him up to charges he was a Timothy Leary who wanted to legalize his favorite drug. He could be faulted for having a political agenda, but not a hidden one. He made no secret of his belief that Ibogaine cou ld plug the gaping hole in AIDS prevention efforts caused by the deficit of treatment for addicts.]

Two weeks later Nelson Mandela landed at Kennedy Airport. At the last minute a stop--the first speaking engagement on his U.S. tour--had been added at Brooklyn Boys and Girls High School. Because ROCK AGAINST RACISM was the only one with the equipment to do it on such short notice, the T.K. Forcade rock and roll assault sound stage was pressed into service, and Dana ended up being one of the roadies.

When Mandela was done with his speech, Dana tapped him on the back with a copy of the VILLAGE BEAT article (he'd given away all the VOICE reprints). As Mandela turned to see what it was, the security on stage in front of the two of them parted. The mom ent was captured on television all over the city: Dana Beal handing Nelson Mandela the Ibogaine information. They shook hands. And then, gesturing to the piece of paper but encompassing the stage, ROCK AGAINST RACISM, the Staten Island Project, the entire organization he'd spent his life building since 1965, Dana said: "We worked for twenty-five years on this."

[Richard_smoker]

CHAPTER 9: Jon Parker


Later that afternoon, June 22, 1990, Dhoruba bin Wahad experienced the crowning moment (at least 'til that point) of his life. Black radicals in Harlem had demanded Dhoruba--not Charles Rangel, David Dinkins or Jesse Jackson--must give the welcoming ad-dress at 125th Street. Only an ex-political prisoner unjustly imprisoned for nineteen years for a crime he didn't commit was qualified to greet Mandela, they insisted.

The politicians, he said, "do not want me to give you this address, because they do not want our South African brothers to know there are Black political prisoners held in the United States!

" There is a common thread and a common humanity that we all share. My Brother, I have spent 19 years in prison in the United States for my political beliefs, and you, sir, you were the symbol that helped sustain me and other African American politi cal prisoners!" And they shook hands, and were seen embracing all over the world.

Dhoruba Moore, now bin Wahad, had been released on February 19, 1990--his conviction overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct--and that very day Dana had given him the news about Ibogaine also. Once, when Dhoruba was still in prison and Tanaquil Jon es was being evicted, Alan Thompson stopped it by parking the soundstage in front of her building; so in the next few months, Dhoruba began to work together with RAR.

February 1990 was also the month Dana met the pioneer of needle exchange in the United States, Jon Parker. Parker had already been driving down from Boston every week for more than a year to exchange clean needles for dirties with his "regulars" at th e corner of Delancey and Essex. Now he was pulling together survi-vors of the small city program cancelled by David Dinkins, John Morgan's group and ACT UP for a test case. A month earlier, he'd just won the first test case in the country in Boston, and he was on a roll. He was determined to overthrow needle prohibition wherever it existed.

Parker created a situation where the i.v.. drug users committee of ACT UP had to play catch up: In March, 1990, Dana accompanied Richard Elovitch up to the front of the ACT UP meeting for the only time. Together they moved the floor to endorse a prot est at Delancey and Essex, where eight activists including Parker would court arrest for needle exchange. But the minute Beal started talking civil rights for drug users, Elovitch ruled him out of order.

The protest went as planned; the case of the Needle Exchange 8 began wending its way through the courts. In June, Dana gave copies of the VOICE article to Parker and everyone else doing needle exchange at the new site, Rivington and Attorney, a few b locks from the original site. But most of the others weren't as pioneering as Jon. And Ibogaine didn't have the endorsement of Ernie Drucker and the experts favored by Elovitch and ACT UP honcho Larry Kramer. They just didn't get it.

One evening in August, when Parker was in Thailand setting up needle exchange for the Thai government, he had a flash: If needle exchange is only 35 percent effective in stopping the spread of AIDS, and Ibogaine is 70 percent effective for interruptin g addiction and injection for three to eighteen months or longer, then Ibogaine is a breakthrough technology. Any medical breakthrough against the AIDS pandemic must be used, the sooner the better. When he got back to the U.S. and informed Dana, Beal aske d him to speak at the November 10th Stop the Drug Wars March in Washington.

By August America was gripped by the worst pot drought in history, as Bush interdiction efforts--which only seemed to proliferate the more compact hard drugs--virtually eliminated bulky, smelly marijuana from the market. An ounce of moldy pot became m ore expensive than an ounce of coke, and even THE NEW YORK TIMES noticed. There were back-to-back famines in '90 and ' 91, with only a few months break during the winter.

On August 4th, 1990 Dana flew in and spoke at a rally for his best friend in San Francisco, Dennis Peron, who'd been busted for pot in January. The pot belonged to Beal's second-best friend in S.F., Jonathan West, who was using it to fight off his AIDS. The stress of the case was killing him. In nine months the most beautiful man Dana knew had turned into a concentration camp survivor with KS lesions on one eye. And with the famine, because the only pot Jonathan could get was moldy, his lungs were trashed. He lived just long enough to plead guilty in September to possessing the four ounces of pot in January, which saved his best friend, Dennis Peron, from five years imprisonment as a predicate felon. Ten days later Jonathan West died.

Nonetheless, outside of San Fransisco the marijuana movement still wasn't ready to deal with"safe drugs" AIDS. When Dana was heckled by a group of rednecks and off-duty cops at the annual Woodstock Reunion concert two weeks later, hemp activists present decided the thing to do was to have him do a lot less speaking.

Two weeks after that he was banned in Boston from a "marijuana freedom fighter" rally, to keep him from bringing up Ibogaine instead of hemp. So he joined the Hemp Tour and talked Ibogaine from Philadel-phia to Madison, Wisconsin. The hempsters hit back by spreading the phony factoid about him owning "hundreds of thousands in Ibogaine stock" everywhere he went.

But the lowest blow came when "freedom fighters" put Baumann's phony Ibogaine death story into HIGH TIMES without checking out the ultimate source: a German supermarket tabloid.

We now know, based on Glick's work, that one possible way to boost the effect of 400 mgs. of Ibogaine to get an overdose is to give it with amphetamine. In fact according to Goutarel, Claudio Naranjo submitted a patent application in 1969 for a drug composed of the total alkaloids of Tabernanthe iboga roots combined with amphetamine. MDMA is an amphetamine. After the controversial Baumann session, it was determined that 6 doses of MDMA were unaccounted for. Baumann's prefered drug for his intrusive brand of therapy is MDMA--which makes the patient putty in the therapist's hands. Ibogaine subjects just want to be left alone.

Justifiable suspicions that MDMA had been administered with or after the 400 mgs. of Ibogaine were not dispelled, and if anything increased, when the Swiss Psychelytic Association agreed to stop working with Ibogaine in order to preserve research access to other psychedelics in Switzerland. "The treatment of addiction," Baumann pronounced, "is beyond the competence of the psychiatrist."

To say the least, the move by Baumann to clear MDMA by blaming everything on Ibogaine, and the rush by Rick Doblin (America's foremost MDMA proponent) to reprint a story from a supermarket tabloid, should have set off alarm bells at HIGH TIMES. Especially when the approval for MDMA had just been withdrawn by the FDA over safety concerns.

John Spacely, a consistent Ibogaine booster who tried to mediate between his friends at High Times and Beal, asked them to lighten up with their coverage. But he was closer to the problem. It was around that time he informed Dana that Stiv Bators, who'd wandered out of his place drunk a few nights earlier and been hit by a car at 9th Street, had walked away unaware of serious internal injuries because of the methadone analgesia -- and died a day later. Happens frequently. Nasty combination, methadone and alcohol. Three out of 623 subjects in the LAMM (longer-acting methadone) trials diad -- two from impairment of their body's ability to process other shit they took while they were on LAMM.

Advocates of environmental hemp were not alone in suspecting Ibogaine, if it worked, would disrupt any agenda they might have. Jon Parker had agreed to speak at the November 10th Stop the Drug Wars March even though he would have to drive all the way down from Boston to Washington two weekends in a row. On November 3rd he had to be at the annual Drug Policy Foundation awards dinner to collect a $50,000 check for his victories on behalf of needle exchange.

The foundation's deputy director, Kevin Zeese, had specified that doing a Stop the Drug Wars March the day after his conference would be considered a "hostile act"; so six months earlier Dana reluctantly rescheduled it from the 4th to the November 10 th, even though it meant the DPF crowd would not be able to attend. And the one thing Zeese, his boss Arnold Trebach and their big-bux backer Richard Dennis all asked Parker not to mention his speech was Ibogaine. The minute it was not a drug to be lega lized but a treatment to be approved, they were all for ten years of painstaking tests and bureaucratic footdragging. Or else they bought the Baumann story, and were willing to sacrifice a potential addiction interrupter on the altar of Ecstasy.

At the awards dinner Jon and his mother shared a table with Howard, Norma, Sisko, Dana and Boaz Wachtel. Jon's mother, a poor Irishwoman from South Boston, saw her son tell a roomful of doctors, lawyers, scientists and even a sprinkling of U.S. judg es how--after spending his adolescence in juvenile detention and much of his adulthood dealing drugs or in prison--one day he was sitting in a shooting gallery in New Haven watching dozens of addicts clean their needles in the same glass of bloody water. The year was 1987, and Parker was a pre-med sudent at Yale, where they were teaching him AIDS could be spread through shared water89and cottons, and not just needles.

Jon Parker got so mad about that glass of bloody water that he started the first U.S. needle exchange, because he knew giving them a sharp new needle was the only way to get the addicts in where you could get the information out. And now his mom was seeing him honored before a roomful of experts with a $50,000 award.

The next day, the day Dana had moved the demonstration from--Sunday, November 4-- turned out to be unseasonably warm, a beautiful 65-degree day. November 10th was cold and wet. The third speaker at the Capitol was Dhoruba bin Wahad.

"The War on Drugs that's being waged in the Black Community is a racist excuse for the militarization of the police and the eradication of Black people in this country. The CIA, the FBI and other government agencies have been the major importers of h ard drugs into the Black Community ever since the end of World War II. As the head of the CIA, George Bush helped import drugs into this country, and he continues to collaborate with tyrants and dictators who profit off of hard drugs and the the exportat ion of hard drugs.

"In the Black Community, the term for the importation of drugs and the murder of our youth is genocide. I think that, if you are steadfast in your struggle to decriminalize certain aspects of drugs, if you are steadfast in your position that there should be an emphasis on treatment and not on criminalization, you can begin to make a difference in the war on the Oppressors who import drugs.

"Finally, I want to say to you, that the struggle to free poltical prisoners in the United States is a struggle against racist and arbitrary repression-- that if you do not stand up for the freedom, and dignity, of political prisoners who went to pri son and sacrificed their lives for the liberation and empowerment of their people, then one day you might be a political prisoner, and there'll be no movement to support you!

"So you must make a stand. You must take a position. You must take a position to free all political prisoners in the United States and you should take a position that opposes the War on Drugs in the Black Community. Finally, I'd like to say, stay str ong, be strong, and fight the Power!"

Halfway through the next speaker, word came that the Capitol Police were busting Dhoruba and his bodyguards just out of sight 300 yards away. The entire crowd--600 people--went running over to surround the cops, chanting "Let them go! Let them go!" Th e cops, outnumbered, backed down. Jon Parker was part of the action that freed Dhoruba. Later he confided to Dana that twenty years earlier, like many working-class white kids, he'd thought the Black Panthers were incredibly cool. That militancy was part of the reason he chose a name for his organization likethe National AIDS Brigade.90

On Thanksgiving Dana had dinner with Marty Robinson. Marty, whose AIDS had progressed, was wheezing. But he was very proud he'd brought his own pot; the drought was still on. Dana took one look at the pot and said: "This is really moldy. It would giv e me bronchitis, and I'm healthy. Throw that away. Let me give you something good." But the drought wouldn't ease for another month, so of course he accepted Dana's gift, but kept his own, and got sicker. That grey mold causes aspergillosis in peo ple with AIDS.

Ten days later Parker came to the ACT UP floor with info that a rule mandating nonjury trials for misdemeanors in NYC had expired. He wanted to clog the courts with new needle exchange protests. The rest of the Needle Exchange 8 prefered to wait for t heir trial in the spring. Parker won the vote, but on the day of the action, December 12, no one showed up but Sisko, Howard and some other Lower East Side denizens including Pope Michael. The cops broke Parker's wrist.

Dana went straight from the protest to a speaking date in Providence, Rhode Island, and then to Boston, to try to repair relations with the legalization move-ment that had cancelled his speaking gig a few months earlier. But the Boston "freedom fight ers" still wouldn't parlay, so he stayed with Jon and Andrew Hoffman. By the end of January he'd been up and back three times talking to everyone. And then he learned Parker was in trouble.

On January 24, 1991 with part of his $50,000 award, Jon opened a needle exchange office in Roxbury just down the block from the dope spot where he'd been doing street needle exchange. Neighbors already uptight about the dope spot flipped out. They were joi ned in daily pickets of the AIDS Brigade office by the Rev. Ellis-Hagler, who'd been feuding with Jon ever since he'd kicked Jon's nascent needle exchange group out of his church three years earlier.

After two days of picketing under the banner of Treatment on Demand, in the midst of a screaming match (where inflamatory things were said about Jon's mo-ther, who was dying), Ellis-Hagler decked Jon on television. Once the daily pickets took on the coloration of black/white violence, the majority of the needle exchange decided to dump Jon, keep his money and discontinue needle distribution out of the office.

Mind you, in principal all factions involved were in favor of treatment on demand. Dana decided to broker a truce by getting all sides to stifle the needle exchange dispute in favor of a broad front to get Boston addicts Ibogaine as soon as possible. Because Ibogaine was the only affordable effective treatment available in the pipeline "on demand." But there was one fly in the ointment: The Clean Coalition (the storefront minus Jon) overlapped with some of the people who'd banned Dana from speaking in September. And if the lie that Dana owned "hundreds of thousands of dollars in Ibogaine stock" started getting pushed around Treatment on Demand, the whole initiative could be torpedoed before it got off the water.

The pot famine in Boston was still going strong, though, and as Dana circulated among AIDS activists promoting an Ibogaine coalition, he kept getting inquiries about good pot, because all the PWAs could get was moldy. As a matter of fact, cheap ($75 an ounce, versus $200 in Boston) non-moldy stuff was now available on the Lower East Side. Hoping to cement relations with people who'd just learned about Ibogaine, from him, Dana agreed to make inquiries.

When he got back to New York, Howard called and told him to look at the New York Post. Charles Kinsky was dead. He had been down on his bed. Charles, whose rock'n'roll fashion business was struggling, had turned to tge last resort of many a countercultureal businessman in the City, and tried to make ends meet by finding a buyer for a large amount of fronted hashish. It wasn't any good, and way too expensive. His buyers turned out to be junkies -- the very people Charles was trying to help. Junkies with guns. They ultimately went to prison for decades. But the Ibogaine project had lost a vital activist with unique celebrity contacts.

Dana was in shock, yet he still thought to call Dhoruba, to ask if he knew anybody put in a good word with Treatment on Demand. "You mean the folks picketing the needle exchange?" asked Dhoruba, "Hey, man, I just got back from Boston, and I spent the weekend with them!"

As a movement of Black accupuncturists, Treatment on Demand was chockful of ex-Black Panthers, and the biggest star--top of the line--they could bring in from outside to rally their troops was none other than Dhoruba bin Wahad. He'd been arriving in Boston just as Dana was leaving.

Dhoruba's main focus, though, superseding his original mission of stopping hard drugs, was to free the 250 political prisoners in the U.S. To do that, he had to stay out of jail himself. Three months earlier Dana's people--led by Dennis Peron, Ben M asel, Jack Herer, Aron Kay and, yes, Jon Parker, had kept the cops in D.C. from snarfing him up.

Besides, you don't take on a Panzer division with rocks and bottles, or even a machine gun. Not when you have the atomic bomb. Ibogaine, not picketing, is the way to stop hard drugs. What Dana needed was for someone to vouch for Ibogaine, plus an intr o to Treatment on Demand--and not through the Needle Exchange side, but by someone with impeccable credentials on the other side. Dana asked Dhoruba to propose a freeze on a protests outside the needle exchange, and a broad coalition around Ibogaine.

Dhoruba came down to East Third Street, where they sat around Sisko's kitchen table as Howard told him about their journey to meet Omar Bongo, and "Gabon's gift to the world." The next weekend, February 17, Howard, Sisko and Boaz drove up to Boston wi th a very prestigious introduction to Treatment on Demand and Ellis-Hagler from Dhoruba, who vouched for them but said they'd have to convince people about Ibogaine on their own. Dana traveled up separately on the train and brought Andrew Hoffman to the m eeting.

Actually, they were a bit overwhelming. Dhoruba suggested Dana go back the next week alone. Meanwhile, the AIDS activists wanted to know, where's the pot? Parker, who'd just had his own people roll over on him and stop needle distribu-tion from the of fice, was paranoid about driving pot back from NYC, even though he drove the thousands of needles down from Boston every week.

On Saturday, February 23, the morning of the ground invasion of Kuwait, Dana got up and headed out to La Guardia with two and a half pounds of pot strapped to his back. (The night before the source, who'd lost numerous friends to AIDS, upped the shipm ent from a pound so he wouldn't have to do it again soon: "I'd been holding this for two weeks already," he complained. "Tell them they can take as long as they want to pay.") Dana was flying because he felt he had not been sharp enough the week before, a fter spending the whole night on the train. His main mission was to get to Roxbury by 11 A.M., in time to meet with Black treatment professionals from all over New England. He wasn't even thinking about the pot as he went through the metal detector at the Pan Am Shuttle. The airline, after Lockerbie, with the tightest security in the business. Traveling under his own name, which is on the ADEX list of people to be picked up in the event of a national emergency (See composite of FBI files, page right). On the morning of a full national security alert. Dana was pat-searched and busted.

He didn't get to show the Nico tape to Treatment on Demand for three more weeks. It wasn't until April 23, 1991, that Moses Saunders, the executive director of Treatment on Demand, wrote Lotsof a letter, placing Treatment on Demand foursquare behind t he project: "We are very pleased to participate in the research initiative around the drug Ibogaine."

Dana would have loved to have gone public and fought the pot charges, like Dennis and Jonathan. But that would blow his nascent Ibogaine coalition. So he decided to delay, because with Bill Kunstler always on a murder trial, cases usually took more than a year anyway. The best the Queens ADA (a certain Karen Rankin) would offer was one-and-a-half to three years in an upstate prison. So Dana finished his last Safe Drugs demonstration May 18, and used it to springboard a July 10th protest called S TORM NIDA FOR IBOGAINE.

The pot bust forced him to work full-time, to get Ibogaine fast-tracked before the eighteen-month sentence came due. Oddly, the timing was perfect. His probation officer, infuriated that he fucked up three weeks before she was set to terminate his p robation from the '87 bust, forbade him to travel. That kept him from attending Lotsof's initial April 12 meeting with NIDA Medications Development, where they basically told Howard Ibogaine wasn't ready yet to go on the list of medications being develope d for treatment of drug dependency: "Don't call us, we'll call you." And Bill Kunstler got a judge to reverse the P.O. so Dana could travel as long as he informed Probation first.

Then at the end of June at the annual meeting of the Committee on Problems of Drug Dependency (CPDD) in Florida, three papers were presented showing the Ibogaine effect is real. Patricia Broderick said that hundreds of neuroscientists came to rapt attention, straining to hear her findings that Ibogaine did indeed show efficacy against cocaine addiction: "You could hear a pin drop in that room." It was a good omen.

On July 1, Dana trekked up to the Rainbow Gathering in Vermont, trying to drum up participants for the July 10 NIDA zap. But as soon as he left, two New York squatters, Lori Rizzo and Barbara Lee, got up and denounced Ibogaine to the full Council, claiming it doesn't work. Barbara Lee'd moved in with Seth Tobocman, a roommate of John Penley, who owned Ibogaine stock -- so she knew better. But in two years since Dana decided to make an issue out of Ibogaine, it had become a litmus test of loyalty for their in-group to say it didn't work, as a way of attacking the new harm-reduction-oriented strategy.

From Vermont Dana travelled to the July 4 White House Smoke-In, where he spoke four times encouraging people to get out to Rockville the following Wednesday at 8 AM, to picket NIDA at the Parklawn Building. He even gave copies of the Storm NIDA leaftlet to Park Police in Lafayette Park, who furnished it to NIDA Medications Development the next morning.

NIDA-crats had no idea how many people were coming, but they did know ACT UP brought almost a thousand people a year earlier to Storm the N.I.H., in the same building at 5600 Fisher's Lane. On Friday, July 5, the first call came in at 2:30 PM from NID A counsel Lee Cummings to the phone number on the leaflet, at #9 Bleecker. On July 9 Charlie Grudzinskas, head of the MDD, faxed Howard a letter stating that they had reconsidered and were placing Ibogaine on the official list of drugs to be evaluated fo r treatment of drug dependency. And they agreed to meet delegations from the ad hoc Harm Reduction Coalition representing ICASH, the AIDS Brigade and others, at 11 AM after the demo.

The action was small, a leaflet zap with banners, really. But every secretary or researcher in the FDA, the NIH, NIMH and NIDA could take a copy of the PharmAnalytica, which began

Daily Brief. Executive Summary. Nov. 12, 1990

International: Drug Addiction Event: A rainforest Alkaloid, Ibogaine, has been report- ed to act as an addiction interrupter across a wide spec- trum of abused substances including heroin, cocaine, amphetamine, nicotine and alcohol. Significance: There is a large potential market for pha r- maceutical products for use in addict detoxification. Analysis: The use of pharmaceuticals in combatting ad- diction is well established, though often of limited success. The claimed effect of Ibogaine is qualitatively dif- ferent from that of establi shed treatments.

Two thousand leaflets went out. No longer could some little group in the building bottle up the information. The entire bureaucracy knew. On thegovernment side at the 11 AM meeting were Lee Cummings, Charles Grudzinskas, his deputy Frank Vocci and Mon a Brown for NIDA public relations; for the coalition, Bob Sisko and Dana Beal, and Eric Sterling of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation.

The main government demand was for rigorous follow-up data, since they wouldn't look at it in humans at all without an FDA green light; but they were skeptical because they hadn't seen it work on humans. "What if there was a secret ingredient?," Vocci asked. Grudzinskas also held up a story from a German supermarket tabloid on the Baumann death. "It might have been a drug interaction," Sisko responded as he asked for a xerox. "But in Gabon, out of thousands who take it, every year there are one or two deaths, usually women or physically slight males. With the root they can't really control the dose."

The NIDA side confirmed Ibogaine was now on their list for evaluation, but refused to issue a statement, although Mona Brown confirmed it to NEWHOUSE NEWS the next day. When they were walking out, though, Lee Cumings did say that if it worked, Ibogaine would be like polio vaccine replacing the iron lung.

With some concrete progress to show for his efforts at last, Dana began really going to every committee of ACT UP looking for a sponsor. He became the Ibogaine man. He stopped putting medical marijuana stuff on the literature table of the Monday night meeting for eight months. He had a new Ibogaine re-print every other week. Finally, he joined the Treatment and Data Committee--the oldest and biggest in ACT UP--just when T&D was looking to open up relations with NIDA.

On October 20th, Max Cantor was found in his apartment, dead of a heroin overdose. He'd been sucked into the scene he was investigating -- junkies and anarchists around Tompkins Square Park cannibal Danny Rakowitz.

Before his arrest in August, '91, Rakowitz definitely sided with Jerry the Peddler and the anti-Ibogaine faction from Tompkins Park, so it made a weird kind of sense for Max (who never quit looking for Charlie Manson) to fish around Rakowitz for a larger Satanic conspiracy -- except that the only Satanists on the scene were a few Aleister Crowleyites sadistically feeding his paranoia. And they were the ones into heroin mystique, so that Max should have known better. But he was always a garbage head--that was why he gravitated to Pope Mickey. He was scheduled to be flown to Holland f or Ibogainization. Howard begged him to throw away his needles, because he recognized Max was out of control, but Max was one of those yuppies who think reality doesn't apply to them.

Dana phoned Grudzinskas and told him the writer of the VOICE article had OD'ed, and asked him how many more have to die. He got a new meeting for October 29th. Treatment and Data was in the midst of a big split after getting ddI and ddC approved. They voted to send a representative to the meeting, and much to the surprise of most present, one of the real luminaries of ACT UP, Dr. Iris Long, jumped at the opportunity.

Iris Long is one of the early heroines of the AIDS crisis. She's in the book Best of Intentions.. You could tell they were impressed when Frank Vocci asked her to autograph his copy. Their response was to pre-empt ACT UP's entrance by walking into the room with a time-line already set, for clinical trials (Phase I human toxicology) in one year. It included:96

A) Radiolabeling Ibogaine for autoradiography studies to locate and quantify Ibogaine receptors, followed by displacement studies to identify agonists and antagonists and determine binding characteristics;

B) Toxicology studies to determine neurotoxicity and to determine if Ibogaine is cumulatively toxic;

C) Pharmacological and metabolic studies; D) By March or April, stability testing, dose ranging and dosage form development;

E) Cognitive studies;

And by August 1992, the filing of their own Investigative New Drug (IND) application with the FDA, leading to clinical studies by late fall, 1992.

Besides Iris Long and the harm reduction reps from the July meeting, the coalition side included John Morgan of CUNY and David Goldstein. The government had the same reps as before. They did confirm Ibogaine psychoactivity would not be an impediment t o tests in humans, and agreed to include HIV-positive addicts. And they were warned that the competitive bid regulations they were invoking against dealing through Howard Lotsof with OMNICHEM of Belgium (the only source in the world with 99.7 percent pure synthetic Ibogaine HCI in stock) might be a real stumbling block. They said it would be easier to go through SIGMA, their regular supplier, which turned out not to be able to get Tabernanthe iboga out of Gabon. That set everything back five mont hs.

Still, Iris Long said this time-line was about on par with current AIDS drug development times. Bringing ACT UP had turned the trick. Ibogaine was fast-tracked.

As for Jon Parker, he's re-established the AIDS Brigade in a storefront in South Boston. In June, 1992, he turned his thesis on Needle Exchange to get his degree from Yale Medical School. In it he said the one innovative treatment modality the AIDS B rigade had come across addicts using in the field--the single new discovery in drug treatment he thought could make a difference against AIDS--was Ibogaine. Jon still drives down from every week to do AIDS Brigade needle exchange at the corner of Essex a nd Delancey, just after noon on Saturdays.

Of late he's been working with Jennifer, who was treated with Ibogaine for heroin addiction in Holland in August, 1991, on the trip when Bob Sisko got his retreatment. With the sense of purpose she derives from the AIDS Brigade, Jennifer's treatment is succeeding.

[Richard_smoker]

CHAPTER 10: Carlo Contoreggi



Howard Lotsof actually first contacted Charlie Grudzinskasbefore he was appointed head of MDD in January, 1991. Scanning a publication calledThe Scientist in November, 1990, he noticed an interview of a Lederle exec on regulatory changes needed to develop new drugs to treat drug dependency. It paralleled Howard's own thinking, including orphan drug provisions and the suspension of product liability (since all new daily-dose medications will wind up in druggies who can croak from street drugs a nytime they relapse). Howard was so impressed he phoned the interviewee, Grudzinskas.

Near the end of their first conversation he told him: "You know, my company has a really effective, single-dose, broad-spectrum treatment for addiction."Howard sent him Ibogaine material and they talked again. During their third phone conversation, Charlie told him he was leaving Lederle to become head of Medica- tion Development at NIDA, and told him to send a letter requesting a meeting. but after he was in office, so it would be official. "I want to get in first. Send the letter after I get app ointed, in January." That letter led to the April 12th meeting.

But the old boy's network had given Grudzinskas a deputy to watch-dog him, named Frank Vocci. In 1987, Vocci wrote the guidelines for emergency Schedule I classification of new hallucinogens, etc, as drugs of abuse. He was the one who asked about fl ashbacks, freak-outs, etc., as if Ibogaine was just another LSD analog. Both ACT UP and Howard, meeting with him separately, had to assure him in Grudzin-skas' presence that this is a neutral, cognitive experience; that it's waking REM, not hallucinatio ns, and so-on. But Vocci watched Grudzinskas' back, and kept him firmly in the NIDA loop whenever he tended toward running MDD as a private company, not wanting to tell public interest groups what was going on.

One of the points of contention at the July 10th meeting was the restrictions on Carlo Contoreggi. In March of the previous year, Bob Sisko had opened his own line into NIDA, but through NIDA's Addiction Research Center (ARC) at John Hopkins in Baltim ore, not MDD in Rockville. At that point Medications Develop-ment was still being formed out of NIDA pre-clinical research in response to Sen. Biden's language in the 1988 Omnibus Anti-Crime Act, mandating a seach for a "magic bullet" to cure addiction.

Sisko had come to Dr. Contoreggi following up on Howard's contacts with ARC Medical Director Bob Lange, who'd at least shown a willingness to listen. He and Carlo are the ARC medical officers. If some one has a bad reaction in a clinical trial to one of the medications ARC is investigating as a treatment, instead of having a researcher who often has years of effort invested in a pet drug treat the complications, an independent physician comes in, treats the complications, and writes up a report. Bo th Lange and Contoreggi are watchdogs. But Lange is the boss: Carlo is the one who actually runs down and treats the crackhead who's having a seizure. So he's seen a hundred different drug cures in action. And both he and Lange knew almost everything NID A was testing was not living up to initial claims. In fact, they were bombing out.

Sisko brought Contoreggi one addict to look at, before and after treatment, since Ibogaine isn't legal in the U.S. and Carlo wasn't willing to fly off to Holland based on a rumor. The same junkie interviewed in the VILLAGE BEAT as "Dragonheart." He w as a rock promoter snorting $500-a-day of heroin. When he walked into Contoreggi's office before Ibogaine, he was in bad shape--pale, emaciated, bent over. And during the interview, he progressed from nodding out to the chills and shakes of withdrawal. Th e only way he could finish the battery of questions and tests was for Carlo to give him an on-the-spot injection of morphine.

Carlo had to admit Sisko had brought him abona fide addict. When Dragon- heart came back two weeks later, Contoreggi couldn't believe the difference. "This tall, straight athletic-looking guy walks in. No pallor. No trace of withdraw al. In fact he's radiating good health, looks like he's been working out. There's a bounce in his step, a sparkle in his eye. The thing is, I'm a clinician--an M.D., not a rat scientist. I knew we had nothing in development that could do that. It's physic ally impossible in that timeframe."

Addicts with money smoke heroin, by frying it on a piece of tinfoil and sucking up the vapor with a straw. They call it "chasing the dragon." During the second interview the ex-addict told Carlo how before treatment, he felt the Dragon had his heart i n its claws, but nowhe had the Dragon's heart. He wanted his case-name to be "Dragonheart."

The scientist in Carlo Contoreggi was hooked. But then his enthusiasm came to the attention of Bob Lange's boss, Dr. Jerome Jaffee, the overall head of the Addiction Research Center.

Since one third of NIDA's budget goes to the ARC, Jaffee was definitely part of the old-boy network. He'd come up with Herb Kleber, who twenty years earlier had Contoreggi's job. After the conclusion of Ted Koppel's Night-Line town meet- ing, Septem ber 8, '88, Dana buttonholed Jaffee and asked: "When are we going to have Ibogaine?"

"Never," said Jaffee, "We have test results showing it doesn't work." His air of smooth assurance was so great that even Dana was rocked back. A doubt was planted in his mind that wasn't dispelled until the day several months later when Fred told him he'd taken it, and it did work. And of course, Jaffee and Kleber had nothing whatsoever to show it wouldn't work in humans. What they had is a rat study with a wrong paradigm, designed to have the experiment fail, and then to publish the results in orde r to make it appear that Ibogaine had no value.

In 1990 Jaffee and Sharpe published a study entitled Ibogaine Doesn't Work.They concluded Ibogaine administered subcutaneously (under the skin) failed to reduce naloxone-percipitated withdrawal in morphine-addicted rats, except for depressing o ne sign: grooming. Since that contradicts the findings of Dzoljic, Ka-plan & Dzoljic (1988), Aceto, Bowman & Harris (1990), and all the findings of Stan- ley Glick's braintrust, Glick decided further work was necessary to resolve this.

Jaffee and Sharpe implied that all the other researchers had mistaken the temporary depression of motor activity caused by Ibogaine-induced tremor for genuine attenuation of withdrawal. After all, immediate effects of Ibogaine include drastic reductio n of bar-pressing for water. But the morphine in Dzoljic's experiment was implanted., not self-injected, by the rats, so Glick's Albany Medical College group got together with the Capitol District Center for Drug Abuse Research and Trea tment, and did a definitive, two-stage experiment to resolve the descrepancy.

In Part I, rats addicted after five days of morphine were given interperitoneal-ly (i.p.: in the gut) 20, 40 and 80 mg.-per-kg. of Ibogaine thirty minutes before one mg.-per-kg. of naltrexone HCl. Glick found that wet-dog shakes, grooming, teeth-cha ttering and diarrhea were all depressed 50 to 70% or more. Weight-loss and head-burying were marginally affected. At 40 mg.-per-kg. of Ibogaine, flinching was also depressed more than 50%.

But not only might Ibogaine-induced tremors during the first two hours be skewing the results, their unmistakable visibility made a true double-blind study impossible. So Glick & Co. ran Part II of the experiment with the lowest completely efective do se--40 mg.-per-kg--given four hours before naltrexone, so the tremor would be totally dissipated. Wet-dog shakes and grooming were still depressed more than fifty per cent. Teeth-chattering and diarrhea were virtually knocked out. (Weight-loss and he ad-burying increased slightly).

Now in the fine print, Jaffee and Sharpe had covered themselves in the fine print of their paper, warning that discrepancies between their results and all others might be due to species variations in the rats, subcutaneous versus interperitoneal or intercerebro-ventricu lar (directly into the ventricular spaces of the cerebrum) administration of Ibogaine. Glick added a different mode of injection of, and a longer exposure to mor-phine, plus use of naltrexone instead of naloxone. Still, he writes, every researcher found evidence Ibogaine lessened morphine withdrawal in animals. Even Sharpe and Jaffee found lessening of one sign--grooming--indicating Ibogaine should 100continue to be investigated for treating opiate dependence, whatever the explanation.

But this study, Effects of Ibogaine on Acute Signs of Morphine Withdrawal in Rats: Independence From Tremor (S. D. Glick, K. Roseman, N.C. Rao, I. M. Maison-neuve & J. N. Carlson) wouldn't even be accepted for publication until November, 19 91. In August, 1990, Jaffee had his paper published and in hand, and as Carlo Con- toreggi's ultimate boss, ruled that he could not do any more pre- and post-treatment evaluations of Ibogaine, under pain of being fired on the spot.

At their July 10, 1991 meeting with MDD, the reason become clear to Dana and Sisko. Vocci took the line that there was no urgency to get Ibogaine into clinical trials, because there was no hard evidence it worked in human addicts at all, and that NIDA couldn't help in developing that evidence. Medications Development was enjoined from even looking at a Schedule I drug in humans, no matter what it might do to stop addiction, AIDS crisis and all. Even pre- and post-treatment evaluation in humans would r epresent tacit NIDA approval-- MDD complicity in an end-run around FDA.

That was the reason why, in the timeline presented presented October 29th, Vocci proposed doing the entire 1971 Dhahir toxicology study over again in the the timeline presented October 29th. It was also why ACT UP argued strenuously that Ibogaine must be considered an AIDS drug, either due to impact on prevention or because narcotic depression of the immune-system may well be a co-factor in the progression of AIDS.

Dr. Peter Hartsock of NIDA, whose New Haven study broke the back of resistance to needle exchange, and tangled with the Kleber/Jaffee crowd continuously, said their method is to obstruct from the shadows with whispers, to stab in the back. Pretty clearly, the ir strategy for stopping Ibogaine was to keep it in rat studies forever, hoping it could be made to appear to fail there, when the real question is why in works so much better in human addicts than in rodents.

By Oct. 29th 1991 the harm reduction coalition had more than three dozen human case studies, enought to tell the MDD that 25% walk away from hard drugs forever after one treatment; on 25% it's effective less than a month. Of the middle 50%, one third (ab out an additional 15%) experience "shallow re-entry syndrome": they try using drugs again, but find they just don't like them anymore, so they too are drug-free after six months, giving an actual single-dose success-rate of 40%. The 35% remaining can b e kept substantially drug-free with treatments every six months and adjunct support groups like Narcotics Anonymous. (Of course, if you could put AIDS into remission every six months with two days of chemo, the media would tout it as a cure.)

There are also indications that after three or more treatments the interrupter effect may "take" (like a successful organ transplant), due to the "maturing out" of the addict, which Bob Sisko relates to the use of iboga in Gabon to initiate adolesc ents into adulthood. Of course, whenever he's start talking Bwiti, as in "accessing your hereditary archive," Vocci and Grudzinskas would just roll their eyes.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of October '91, Dhoruba Bin Wahad came out for hemp in front of 20,000 people at Ben Masel's Annual Harvest Fest in Madison, Wisconsin. A few days later, Oct. 9th, on appeal by the Manhattan District Attorney, his convictio n was re-instated by New York's higest court. The rules had been changed in the middle of the game. Merely showing prosecutorial misconduct was no longer enough to keep him free. Now his lawyers had to prove the evidence withheld, the outright fabrication s, would have materially affected the outcome of the trial. He flew to Paris, then Ghana; it looked like he might stay in Africa, in exile.

In November, 1991, on election day, Dennis Peron's San Franscisco ballot initiative for medical marijuana for people with AIDS passed by the largest per centage of votes in city history--80%. The national media made a big thing of it, and as far away as Washington, D.C., pollsters and politicians sat up and took notice.

At the beginning of January, 1992, Herb Kleber left his Office of National Drug Control Policy (Deputy Drug Czar) position, ostensibly to protest Bush continuing its 70-to-30 ratio of law enforcement to treatment.

Actually he was taking a better-pay ing, more politically-secure job as head of Columbia University's Substance Abuse Division, preparatory to become Number 2 man at a new think tank called the Center on Addicition and Substance Abuse (CASA) under Joe Califano, who stopped pot decrim as HEW Secretary in 1979, and blocked early U.S. adoption of the Dutch harm reduction model. Since all subsequent Dutch reforms like needle exchange flowed from decrim of pot there in 1976, this Carter administration decision was arguably responsible for half o f all AIDS cases in the U.S.

Curiously, although SUNY, CUNY, Cornell and virtually every university in and around N.Y.C. are now engaged in Ibogaine research, Columbia has since 1986 refused even to do rat studies "on the advice of their attorneys." (Or under the influ-ence of te nured faculty like Gabriel Nahas. His marijuana pseudo-science, sponsored by the U.N. Office on Narcotics when it was headed by the daughter of Lyndon LaRouche, whipped up pot hysteria in the '70's, until de-bunked around 1980 when every finding turned ou t to be faked. There is a definite mentality that opposes Ibogaine simply because it comes from the harm reduction side, and because it isn't effective against pot). The President of Columbia, Michael Sovern, is on the Board of CASA. And despite having He rb Kleber as Assistant Director for Medical Affairs, CASA's charter specifically excludes funding biomedical research, in favor of prevention through education and long-term residential treatment.

Prominent on CASA's board is Jim Burke, head of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, whose stated goal is mobilize the Advertizing Industry to fosterintolerance of illegal drugs and those who use them. Alcohol and tobacco are never102 targeted in their ads, perhaps because their corporate sponsors include Anheuser-Busch and RJR-Nabisco, along with the biggest banks, pharmaceutical companies, and top media like Capitol Cities (ABC). (See Partnership list, next 2 pages). Their ads equating marij uana and hard drugs are omnipresent on television and in the papers, which get tax write-offs. CASA seems to have been formed as a think tank to fine-tune their message, after some of those ads turned out to be wildly inaccurate. (One showing the "brainwa ves of a teenager on pot" as totally flat, was actually from a middle-aged drunk in a coma after a car accident.) Currently they say pot has no medical value whatsoever, and that people who smoke it are cop-killers, regardless of their medical condition .

It is highly ironic that in the name of a Drug-Free America, the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, which bank-rolls both Partnership and CASA, supports Dr. Herbert Kleber--the man who is suppressing Ibogaine in favor of the addictive drug buprenorphine .

At the end of January '92, Herb Kleber's successor at ONDCP, Ingrid Kolb, signaled a possible thaw by writing a letter to Assistant Secretary for the Health and Human Services (HHS) James Mason, chiding him for keeping the applications of PWA's for medical marijuana in limbo.

Dana Beal noticed in news accounts that her title was Acting Director for Demand Reduction. He thought of people he knew who before Ibogaine were doing $200-to-$300-a-day of smack, who after a couple treatments may-be do $5 worth twenty times a year. That's a lot of demand reduction. Perhaps the medical marijuana letter was a sign this Kolb woman would be rational.

So Beal called Ingrid Kolb and asked on behalf of ACT UP for a meeting on "promising medications in the NIDA pipeline for treatment of drug dependency." He brought along Alan Thompson of RAR and Joey Tranchina of the West Coast AIDS Brigade. Joey tal ked to her about clean needles; Ingrid deferred to NIDA, saying the data wasn't in yet. After thanking her for the medical marijuana letter, most of the meeting was about Ibogaine.

No one in the entire bureaucracy had ever told the Acting Director for Demand Reduction they had a prototype addiction interrupter in the works, potentially the magic bullet.

Dana opined he could end the drug crisis, and cut transmission of AIDS as much as 25%, for $2 billion, or enough to treat the one million worst-afflicted addicts. Alan Thompson told here how, in the twelve years Rock Against Racism had known about and supported the Ibogaine Project, he's never been able to put together a band of his own without a junkie in it, and how one musician friend after another died of an overdose. On the way back to New York City, he thanked Dana for enabling him to press his case at the White House.

That very morning, February 13th, Dhoruba had returned from Africa after a great internal struggle with himself, to fight his case all over again--appearing in court just as the ACT UP van was leaving for the meeting, too late to go along. Dana went into overdrive to set up a subsequent meeting that would bring in Dhoruba, actualizing the coalition between ACT UP and the Black treatment movement, but also to substantiate Dhoruba's role and keep him out of prison to continue his work.

The first date Dhoruba, Ingrid Kolb, Grudzinskas and Vocci could all meet was April 10th. Meanwhile Dana spent his days boiling an Ibogaine tape centered on the Nico interview down to 60 minutes.

It was still February when he got a call from John Spacely, in the hospital. When Dana came to visit, Spacely told him he had MAI. A couple of weeks later his HIV results came back positive. His T-cell count was 36. Ibogaine might have saved him in mid 1981, sitting around talking about it with Dana. But it was too late the minute he shared a needle with someone around Bruce Brown. On the other hand, all the years he smoked pot since he stopped doing dope, John Spacely had been free of opportunistic infections, in effect cushioning the decline of his T-cells with medical marijuana. And at first he was able to triple his T's with herbal extracts and vitamins.

ACT UP Treatment & Data sent a letter to James Mason de manding that he reverse his ban on access to medical marijuana for people with AIDS; he refused to have a meeting about it with ACT UP. A few days before Dana was to report on this to the floor, he called Marty Robinson to ask if he'd make a special trip in from Park Slope and come back to the floor one time because of his strong feelings on this. Marty reported that he couldn't smo ke any more, but that he'd gotten his hands on some marinol. Marty'd already promised to testify in Beal's defense. But he was far, far sicker than Dana had expected. "Those boys can't do anything for me anymore," he said of ACT UP.

"But Marty," said Dana, "the Ibogaine got through. T & D backed it. Iris Long got NIDA to fast-track it. That conference we did at City College--it led to research showing Ibogaine works against cocaine--against crack. You made the difference, Marty -- You freed the addicts. You freed the slaves."

"That's nice." Marty mused.

"But what do I do about ACT UP and medical marijuana?" Dana queried. "I'm not gay. I'm not HIV positive. "

"You will the one who gets medical marijuana through," said Marty. Dana hung up the phone in distress. Fifteen minutes later Mark Rubin called back. "Marty is sicker than he let on. If you want to see him again, best come over within the next week. " Dana decided to see him after the T&D meeting Wednesday night. Mark called him Wednesday morning to tell him Marty had died.

Up in Boston, Jon Parker had resumed needle exchange, this time outside the main city hospital several miles from Ellis-Hagler's base in Roxbury. Ellis-Hagler picketed anyway, so that Parker would get arrested only to be immediately released. Dana w ent to Ellis-Hagler trying, unsuccessfully, to get a rep to the April 10th meet-ing. He talked to Treatment-on-Demand's Moses Saunders, who said they'd known for five years that they needed something like Ibogaine. He confided they knew needle exchange w as a done deal--they just wanted to keep the pressure on to get more money for treatment. But at least on days they were meeting with Dana theyweren't picketing. And ACT UP New York was willing to fund the D.C. trip if it had a chance of replacing confr ontation with cooperation.

In the event, Dhoruba was satisfied to be accompanied by an ex-Young Lord, Father Frank Morales of the Episcopal Arch-Dioscese of New York. The other partici-pants on the ACT UP side were Dana Beal, Betsy Lenke, Jeff Eberhardt and David Goldstein for ICASH. Besides Kolb, Vocci and Grudzinskas, the ONDCP also had John Gregrich, on loan from the Justice Dept. The meeting started a bit late due to traffic congestion, so there was really just time for Dhoruba to lay out 2 demands:

1.) The biggest obstacle to new chemotherapies for addiction is community re-sistance, due to experience with the toxicity and extreme addictiveness of metha-done, which was forced on the Black community without their say-so. He demand-ed an independe nt, scientific, inner city-based Afro-American study of Ibogaine--an immediate community-based trial by people with enormous hands-on experience, who are as skeptical as anyone. This would bring folks who are unwilling to use maintenance drugs into Medica tions Development; and from the beginning, rather than too late to make a difference.

2.) Community-based programs that can re-socialize addicts and stem the spread of HIV without undermining the fight against high-level drug dealing or government corruption are getting the shaft, because criminalizing users maximizes income from forfe itures. The system has become addicted to the cash flow it's sup-posed to be eliminating. Dhoruba demanded that 100% of the $400 million-a-year from forfeitures be retargeted, from the financing of new seizures to treating hard-core addicts. That way, i n 5 years the one million most serious addicts who consume 70% of all hard drugs could be treated with Ibogaine or some other fast-acting addic-tion interrupter, for a net demand reduction of 35%.

To point #1, Vocci responded that it would take 18 months to write new regs for community-based trails; but Kolb and Grudzinskas suggested clinics with follow-up capability in Roxbury and Harlem apply to be among the first for funding, and offered to provide grant application guidelines.

Vis-a-vis point #2, John Gregrich confirmed that the great bulk of forfeiture money was going to finance new forfeitures, except for $9 million which Ingrid said was all that Congress left of her request for $90 million out the $400 million for trea ting inner city addicts.

Dana, Betsy and Jeff of ACT UP raised 3 additional matters:

ACT UP asked about, and MDD agreed to furnish data on, sample size and subject being studied (but not location and identity of researchers) in 13 animal 107

studies. ACT UP reiterated the importance of high (99.7%) purity to insure absorb-ability. MDD had only 300 grams of Ibogaine; they were getting 400 grams addition-al from Lotsof. And despite half-hearted attempts to invoke NIDA's Office of Treat-men t Improvement (OTI) as the proper route for lobbying, Vocci and Grudzinkas confirmed the only early clinical access to Ibogaine would be through them.

ACT UP also pointed out that proposed guidelines on undesirable interac-tions of street drugs and new maintenance drugs made no provision for Ibogaine, which is not a maintenance drug and can be screened from interactions with any other drug during th e brief forty-eight-hour procedure. Grudzinskas responded that Vocci had written those guidelines, and asked to be furnished with a set of parameters defining what an addiction interrupter would consist of.

Finally, Dana had touched base with Carlo Contoreggi, and he urged that MDD and FDA re-consider, and allow Dr. Contoreggi to resume pre- and post-treatment evaluation of addicts being flown to Holland. MDD budged, slightly. They offered to test post-treatment for gross neurological disfunction. Jeff pointed out that would provide for no baseline comparison. David Goldstein cited Dhahir (1971), as showing there would be no gross neurological disfunction.

At the end of the meeting MDD still refused to mesh through Contoreggi with Lotsof, the patentholder, because of the treatment he was doing in Holland, a hang-up that had already set back procurement of supplies six months. As ACT UP said in a subseq uent letter to Ingrid Kolb:

"The ban on pre-treatment evaluation...is bothunscientific and legally inconsistent with the Administration position on freedom of travel. ...It is clearly legal for U.S. addicts to fly to Holland, where the procedure is approved as an experimental th erapy. And NIDA wants them evaluated, not prosecuted, when they return.

"[This] ruling...has become an obstacle to NIDA...consulting...the folks who know the most about the procedure: Howard Lotsof and NDA International. In fact, Lotsof is not only com-plying with the letter of all applicable laws and regulations, but in refusing to make ENDABUSE available for casual research or for any other reason except fighting addiction, he is pro-actively fullfilling the intent of the law, which is to fight drug abuse."

But just for insurance, Dhoruba and ACT UP also met that morning with Tim Westmoreland, special AIDS advisor to Congressman Henry Waxman's Committee on Health and the Environment. Tim promised to get language into the pending NIDA re-organization act , mandating community-based trials. Dana in-tended to keephis promise to Treatment on Demand, to bring Ibogaine to Roxbury as soon as possible, no matter what.

Bringing Dhoruba into the negotiations did impress the feds. A few weeks later Los Angeles was burning. For a month or so there was a mood in the Bush Administration to take Black concerns a bit more seriously. Dana sent MDD the requested paramete rs defining an addiction interrupter in early May:

1.) An addiction interrupter must virtually eliminate withdrawal symptoms.

2.) An interrupter must drastically attentuate craving for 3 to 18 months.

3.) An interrupter must block the customary pleasure response that the addict is trained to expect, so his drugs of abusewon't work for the first few weeks.

4.) An interrupter will stimulate the "maturing out" of the addict. The initial REM-like period, involving the firing and retreival of memories and the auto- matic re-editing of memory as a whole is the key to how interruption "takes."

Beal admitted these effects are specific to Ibogaine, but pointed out that interrupter we know must provide the "yardstick" for comparison, just as methadone is our yard-stick for evaluating all the new maintenance drugs in the MDD pipeline.

When he contacted Grudzinskas for his reaction, Dana asked who could do the now-approved post--treatment evaluations. Charlie turned him over to Vocci, who said he should call Contoreggi. But Vocci didn't call Carlo and givehim any kind of authoriza tion.

Just prior to April 10, 1992 meeting, the Queens Judge in Beal's medical marijuana case had tried to force him to trial; and Bill Kunstler informed the court they would bring a defense of medical necessity. The first trial date was the end of June, but the de fense wasn't able to get its witnesses together, so Kunstler filed a motion to dismiss based on medical necessity instead. The clock was running out for Dana, but he had time for a few more moves.

June was the month he tried to set up a meeting with Joe Califano at the apart-ment of his friend Flo Kennedy, on E. 48th St. five blocks from the CASA office. Flo Kennedy had been the lawyer for legenday jazz junkies Billie Holliday and Charlie "Bird " Parker. Herb Kleber refused to allow Califano to meet with Flo and ACT UP when he found the meeting was about Ibogaine.

But Dana's next move was a winner. Howard had a couple of paying treat-ments in Holland a few weeks before the International AIDS Conference in Amster-dam in late July. Beal persuaded him to stay on and do a prototype treatment semi-nar, with Dutch a ddict freebees, in conjunction with the Conference. Then Dana in-vited folks to it who were coming to Amsterdam anyway for the AIDS Conference: Joey Tranchina, Moses Saunders, Dr. Lester Grinspoon, and the real catch, Carlo Contoreggi.

Carlo was ready to quit his job. He'd come up with proof bleaching needles just wasn't as effective as needle exchange, and at the eleventh hour the order had come down from Bob Martinez himself forbidding Carlo to present his data at the Internatio nal AIDS Conference.

All Contoreggi had done was to sit addicts down with their works and some bleach, and tell them to start cleaning. And a lot of them didn't do a thorough job, leaving microscopic bloodclots HIV could live in for ten days or longer. So why not just give them clean works? It's safer for everyone. This directly contradicted the Bush/Martinez/Herb Kleber line. Of course, they'd been against bleach, too, until Jon Parker started overthrowing needle prohi-bition from Maine to Delaware.

"Don't quit," Dana told him. "We need you to stay put while we change everything around you. Instead of defying them directly, go to Amsterdam and sit in on some treatments with Howard. That'd bereal civil disobedience. Let me worry about how t o make it kosher with Grudzinskas and NIDA afterwards."

Contoreggi flew to Amsterdam at his own expense, and came back raving about what he'd seen. "I've treated junkies with more than a hundred drugs, and nothing is like Ibogaine. All signs of addiction are just--gone. You know, on other medicatio ns, junkies always keep asking for dope, nonstop. Instead, after 24 hours, this guy was asking for an Egg McMuffin.

"He wanted an Egg McMuffin!"

When Howard Lotsof and the treatment team flew back from Amsterdam, Dana had them booked for an August 4th presentation set up by accupuncturist Rommell Washington at Harlem Hospital. For 3 1/2 hours, thirty treatment profes-sionals peppered Howard, S isko, Geerte and Dana with questions.

But the clincher was a talk by Dhoruba Bin Wahad, putting Ibogaine in the context of a 25 year strug-gle. He said the Ibogaine team, with the forces they were taking on, were some of the bravest people he knew. No, he said, Ibogaine doesn't violate Muslim teachings. The Koran says any medicine that works can be used to heal the sick. And the word went out in Harlem: the senior surviving Black Panther had endorsed the Project. Doors began opening all over the place.

"Why didn't you invite me?" said Carlo when Dana phoned him afterwards. "Look, I have to come up the weekend of Sept 14th for my radio-medicine boards."

Dana thought a minute and said: "I'll see if I can arrange authorization from Grudzinskas for you to talk with some people who've been treated when you come up--to do a little post-treatment evaluation."

Then he called up Grudzinskas and explained that Vocci'd never got around to the call authorizing Contoreggi to do post-treatment evaluations, as promised in May. He got back to Carlo and told him to expect a call from Medications Develop-ment giving the go-ahead.

"Well, if Grudzinskas calls, I'm going to go public, all the way," said Carlo.110

"What do you mean?"

"If I get my foot in the door, I'm going to shove it open all the way. I'm going to tell them everything I saw in Amsterdam."

The upshot was that Charles Grudzinskas gave post facto authorization for Contoreggi's Amsterdam observations. And invited him down to Rockville to brief fifteen neuroscientists at the MDD on what he'd seen. In Carlo, they finally had one of their own who'd seen it, and could explain the significance of what he'd seen in technical language they could understand. Overnight, Carlo became the govern-ment clinical expert on Ibogaine in humans. Vocci formally made him part of the MDD's Ib ogaine Project.

The man who, like Galileo Galilei, said, "Si il mouve," ("But it moves.") was now in the loop.

[Richard_smoker]

CHAPTER 11: Geerte F.

Howard Lotsof first did an interview on Dutch pirate radio while Geerte (pronounced Heartuh ) F. was attending the 1988-89 Semester of Art School in New York City, where she was renovating Umbrella House, a squat on Ave C. Both Geerte and the pirate radio people considered themselves part of the international squatter's movement.

The pirate radio was in a large squat in Amsterdam. It was affiliated with Hi-Res, a smaller squat with a lot of computers. All the squats in Amsterdam had problems with heroin, Three people from Hi-Res, Chris Schwart, Reinhardt Hecht and Simon, had c ome across published references to Ibogaine, and they wanted their friends and the people they lived with to be treated. But they also wanted the squatter movement to be the group of people to tell the world about Ibogaine. So they were looking into how t o get their own supply, how to get people to eat it, and just doing research.

Hi-Res had to wait until Sisko came to Holland in October, 1989, for two volunteers to be treated--Geerte and Ron. In June, Geerte had returned from New York, where she had learned of Ibogaine in the squat scene, to live with her drug-addicted boyfri end, Ron. She was not using when she made arrangements to treat Ron, but started doing it with him during the three months she spent waiting for Sisko to come. There's a videotape of Chris Swart interviewing Geerte and Ron, helping Sisko with the intake procedure for the first Dutch addicts ever treated.

Ron had been addicted for 12 or 13 years. He had been doing 85 milligrams of methadone every day for twelve years, with one exception--15 months spent in spent in a rehab center to avoid going to jail. He actually followed the program on this rehab fa rm and he was clean under his own power.

But this particular program was merely suppressing Ron's aggression, so that for those 15 months, Ron longed for the day he could get out, and rebel. So one day after he came out of rehab he copped smack, and fell back to using drugs right away--alc ohol, pills, speed, cocaine and anything else he could get his hands on.
Ron had gone into treatment to get out of going to jail. But he learned a lot from the program anyway--which helped him with the Ibogaine treatment. It gave him the experience of being clean, which helps when you're suddenly given Ibogaine. Addicts h ave literally forgotten what it's like to spend a period of time without heroin.
Ron's treatment worked out very well. The day before he was a total wreck, completely chaotic idiot. He took the Ibogaine and he laid down for a day. He was very peaceful, quiet and happy. He came out like he'd been in the laundry machine, like a comp letely different person. That night he sat up and smoked a joint, drank a beer and he was totally happy and balanced.
Geerte was treated the day after Ron. She took the Ibogaine at 8:00 AM on an empty stomach. Sisko kept coming into the room to see if she had laid down yet, to have her walk a bit to check if she appeared wobbly. This only made Geerte determined to w alk in straight lines. She kept telling him the Ibogaine wasn't working. She even ran around a chair to show she had full coordination.

In reality, she was resisting the effect because she didn't know what to expect from the Ibogaine--trying to prove that if she didn't want to be knocked out, she wouldn't get knocked out. It involved intense will power. She had had many mind-bending t rips on LSD and mushrooms, maybe 30 or 40, but she didn't like what this was doing to her, because when she closed her eyes she saw things--

"...Patterns in the beginning, about an hour after you take the Ibogaine, maybe 10% as vivid as LSD. But if you close your eyes, you see all kinds of stuff happening, really rapidly, too. As soon as you close your eyes, you go into a REM sleep thing."

The minute she experienced it, the eyes-closed stuff was familiar. Her mind recognized it as REM-like. What she saw was all these cartoon images--what a child's mind is formed out of in this century. She had been told she'd see a chronological movie of her life, "...but all I saw was these weird cartoon figures coming past. I have a vision of walking through my brain, as if walking in a giant computer-like file-cabinet. There are long narrow drawers with selected, collective information. Somebody in the hotel turned on the radio, with commercials, and I just got-- like all the commercial jingles I ever heard came out of this little drawer in my brain. It came out as one long song, and I visually saw the song.

"Can you imagine all the jingles you ever heard on the radio all coming out as one thing. Like a harmonica. The trip is hard to explain. You're existing on ten different levels at the same time. You don't have any control over it and it just happens t o you. Something you just can't comprehend-- you begin to comprehend it when the experience is over.

"You really feel that something is changing in your mind, and I kept saying to Ron, who was in the room when I got treated: 'There should be a doctor here: we should take a scan of my brain at this very moment. This is really too intense, it can't be happening.'

"It felt like re-programming. I thought, "This is not good. This is way too much. Nobody should experience this because it's way too intense." Weeks after the treatment you start to understand why you experienced the things you did.

"I would sit down on the bed and I'd hear a drum, like someone drumming in the next room. It's not like you hear this drumming in your mind and you can just stop it, like it's just a mind thing. No, it's really happening and you can't stop it. Lik e a African drum. Next thing I know I'm walking in Africa. Literally walking in the jungle with bare feet and snakes around me. Jungle leaves around my face and I thought, "What the fuck is going on?" But then I open my eyes and I"m still in the room. It 's like an out-of-body experience, but you just open your eyes as soon as you want to snap back into your body, and you're there."

The visions of Africa made Geerte uncomfortable-- "For the first time in my life, I accepted being born white in the 20th century in northern Europe." She also found the room irritating. The sheets were really bright red. She didn't like Sisko coming in to check up on her, saying "Maybe we should put some more Ibogaine into you." He seemed like a threatening pigmy from the forest, trying to stuff this root down her throat. Then he would leave to fall asleep, snoring in the next room. She felt they s hould be there for her. Ron was there, but he was taking showers and telling her how great he felt. He was sitting there talking and she said, "Shut up. I'm in the middle of this experience here. Go for a walk or something."

Ron had gotten treated on a Sunday, a really quiet day. It was Monday, and all of a sudden people were cutting trees in front of the hotel, painters were painting windows, people were cleaning the hallways--there was all this noise. Sounds really get intensified on Ibogaine. About three or four hours into the treatment, Geerte decided to split.

"I tried to puke up as much of the Ibogaine as I could. I thought it would stop the effect. It didn't, but I told myself it did, that it should be wearing off in half an hour. It wasn't, I was full-blown into it. But I wanted to go home. I dressed and wrote Sisko, who was still sleeping, a note: "Have fun discovering new cultures in Africa with your freaky friends. See you another time."
On the trainride home to Utrecht, the Ibogaine was active--"I saw a lot of people who I experienced as being 'dead in the head.' " At home she threw up again, which made her feel cheated-- "I was not supposed to have withdrawal now." She went out to her dealer's house, where she smoked some heroin, and felt much better, though still trippy. Throwing up brought relief, but everything tasted and smelled bitter from the Ibogaine.
Late that night, as the heroin effect wore off, she lay down on the couch "in a dreamlike, half-awake state," and the Ibogaine effect resumed as a rapid re-birthing experience. She saw herself as a fetus emerging from her mother's womb, felt "an114 in credible devotional love coming from my parents." This enabled her to accept mistakes her parents made during her growing up: "For the first time, I can feel respect for my parents, which shapes our whole relationship into a harmonious reality." Many ot her dream flashes appeared.

Researchers had known Ibogaine potentiates morphine analgesia, but here was a new finding--opiates potentiated the completion of Geerte's Ibogaine experience. She awoke the next morning completely refreshed, newborn and hungry as a wolf. She gave h er heroin away, and with Ron, started evaluating the experience. New things kept falling into place. It was as if all information in their brain filecabinets was shaken out of its drawers onto one big pile, looked at "objectively" and re-filed, untwisted from emotional trauma.

It took time to realize they're not getting sick, that there's no need to get money to run to the dealer anymore. The days went by--one incredibly energetic and active, the next one needed to relax. A withdrawal never took place-- just some occasiona l yawning and minor chills. Initially their junkie friends were skeptical, until they realized Ron was selling his 65 mg. dose of methadone every day, for weeks in a row, and spending the money on camping gear to go to India, not drugs.
"In a normal withdrawal," said Geerte, " you need all your motivated energy to go through being sick, which burns you out completely." This time their motivation was reinforced, and together with all of the visual experience, Ibogaine put Ron and Geer te on a path directed towards their goal. Some of their junkie friends found this positive attitude irritating. Others wanted to experience Ibogaine too. It was frustrating not to be able to give it to them.

The presence of hard drugs in their environment was neither threatening or particularly attractive: It just didn't matter. Once when Geerte tried heroin to see what it would do, it didn't get her stoned. It seemed to re-activate the Ibogaine. Up unti l four months after the treatment, she experienced colors and light very intensely. Geerte lost interest in drugs in general; she found the effect of Ibogaine went far beyond their effect, though not necessarily in a pleasant way.

Ron stayed heroin-free until they reached Pakistan. Someone who's been a hardcore addict for twelve years finds it hard to resist a gram of smack for 4 dollars a day. Geerte carried all Ron's smack in her underwear for 3 months, because she was least likely to be strip-searched. And she stayed clean--

"For years we'd been hunting it every day, and all of a sudden I was walking around with grams at a time and not touching it, because it made me nauseous, and felt horrible. My first Ibogaine experience also made me stop smoking, for six months. It wa s great."

Upon returning to Holland from Pakistan, India and Nepal, Geerte decided to go back to school in New York. But she had six months left in Holland, and she was so happy to be clean that she didn't want to hang around Ron, who was back to being a full- blown addict. She moved from Utrecht to Amsterdam, leaving Ron. There, all the friends that she told about her experience would come over every day, or call, asking, "Where's the Ibogaine? I want to get treated."

She'd been back a month, in March 1990, when she came into contact with Chris Schwartz again. He said Sisko had phoned and wanted to treat this guy Nico, who had founded the junkiebond in Rotterdam more than a decade earlier. Geerte realized this me ant the international coalition was going to continue doing treatments in Holland. Right away Geerte flashed on the idea of setting up her own addict self-help group to talk to people who were going to be treated, to prepare them. Then they could meet aft erwards to do follow-up, and write up reports.

Chris introduced her to Simon and Reinhardt, who taught her how to work the Hi-Res squat computer. She started with all the information about Ron's and her treatments. She designed questionaires. She did research with Simon about how to get their own supply of Ibogaine. The pharmaceutical companies told them they couldn't give any to people who were not scientific researchers.

Simon, who was English, had contacts in Cambridge with friends who had a laboratory there who said they could produce Ibogaine HCl. As they negotiated, the deal went sour because the Cambridge chemists refused to provide a sample. They just wanted to send the whole shipment, and they wanted cash--about $100 a gram.The squatters were willing to do benefits to raise the money, but at the same time they didn't want the media to catch on.
Then all of a sudden Chris, Simon and Reinhard decided to write a big article for the major newpapers, to tell them about the existence of Ibogaine.

It was May. Nico had been been treated by a team including Geerte. Sisko stuck around a little bit and then he left us 9 or 10 doses of ibogaine to set up a group to start treating Dutch addicts. The first to be treated was Nico's girlfriend, Josien. She was a total heroin prostitute and looked like a holocaust surviver. The only thing she would do is smoke heroin--smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke...and be a prostitute to get the money.
Within a week she was like a new person. She bought a mountain bike and started working out, got totally into vegetarian food... in 3 months she became this big, fat momma. Nico, Josien, and Geerte sat down, read everything on Ibogaine, the whole Afr ican ritual, and figured out how to involve the ritual in treating the next group, Geerte's friends from Utrecht:

"We'd have the person come over the night before his treatment and introduce ourselves as momma and poppa Iboga, because the addict is the child going through re-birth. We would tell them about the African ritual the night before the treatment so tha t they'd totally know what they were going to face. We'd tell them the Africans use it basically to guide people into adulthood so they become more responsible people, and that's what we'd be doing. Making a person more responsible in life, so that he'd have control over drugs instead of drugs over the person.

"If the person was a shooter, we would let him or her take their last shot, then let her or him destroy their syringe, symbolizing the destruction of their addiction. The same went for smokers and snorters--use up their last dose, then destroy the par aphernalia."
"Each treament was a full moon and sun cycle. We had a room with two doors, which was perfect. We'd move someone in through a door with a moon painted on it, into the room where they would have the experience, and then after treatment guide them out t he doorway decorated with a Sun.

"We'd treat the person with much love and care. Momma and Papa Iboga would keep checking up on the person. All the treatments, about 10 in a row during June, July and August of 1990, worked out fine. They were all my circle of friends, because I t hought if they were all going to go home alone, and they didn't know each other, then they wouldn't have any help or recognition from each other. Before they were treated, I visited them at least five times, to prepare them mentally as best I could. I made all these trips to Utrecht.

"Finally, I would introduce them to Nico and Josien, and we would do the treatments at Nico and Josien's house in Rotterdam, which was good because it was another city, and they couldn't just run out to buy heroin. But if people did want to go cop a fter the treatment, we'd first talk about if that was what they really wanted. If so, we'd help them cop.

"We weren't anti-dope, just anti-addiction. We were pro-choice. It was perfectly set up, and all these people from the same generation just clicked. We all used to be members of the revolution but weren't any more. We were all idealists who had falle n into cynicism, and related in a similar way."

Geerte kept going back to Amsterdam after each treatment to put it on the computer. She wrote up each treatment from minute to minute, from intake to after-treatment. "During each treatment we took notes: 9:00 AM--person takes this much Ibogaine. 9 :15 AM-- person vomits up a little Ibogaine. You could read exactly how the treatment would take place, what we said to the person, etc."

But then, after 8 more treatments, Hi-Res--Simon, Chris and Reinhardt--all wanted to go public. Geerte, Nico, Josien objected strenuously. They were afraid publicity would cause the Dutch government to make Ibogaine illegal. What if health authoriti es broke in the midst of a treatment? Geerte said: "First we've got to treat 50 people and get all the data so we can throw out some numbers."

Geerte, Nico and Josien wanted it kept underground; Hi-Res wanted it in the news. So Geerte erased all the data from their computer, took all the information she had laying around, and moved out of the squat.
When she came back to pick up more stuff, Simon told her he had a back-up of all her data on the hard disk, and he was going ahead and making it into an article for the newspapers. Geerte shot back: "You never used heroin. You never used Ibogaine. N ow you want to treat people and tell the newspapers what it's like? This is insane!"

The Hi-Res report, consisting of the information on the hard disk, was released to the newspapers. But most of the newspaper people said, if this was really happening, we would hear from the drug re-habs, we would hear from Erasmus University. We wou ldn't hear it from some people who aren't even junkies, who haven't even experienced Ibogaine themselves.

Chris, Simon and Reinhardt continued to do radio programs about Ibogaine, but the report was premature. It passed around the squats without igniting any kind of serious movement. Geerte, Nico and Josien decided to cut Hi-Res off from all subsequent t reatments. This was in June, when they had done about 6 treatments.
After 8 treatments, Geerte and a friend in Utrecht were seriously talking of an Ibogaine support group. One day Nico's boss, Charlie Kaplan, walked in to Nico's house and suggested that everyone who had tried ibogaine should start a focus group and g et a doctor involved. Soon they were meeting once a week as a focus group, being examined by a doctor, sitting down and talking about their Ibogaine treatment and the aftereffects.
At this point Nico and Josien were totally clean and happy, and so were the others. Some had used heroin in the first weeks after the treatment but didn't become re-addicted. Geerte's treatment was already more than 6 months old, and Ron had found out she'd done heroin here and there, without becoming re-addicted. Yet via the focus group, Geerte found out something very important--

"I kept having contacts with my friends all through the months after my treatment and they basically all slowly but surely fell back into their addiction. The people who were dealing the heroin were very powerful, socially. They had friends in the foc us group going back ten, fifteen years--they went all the way back to hippie times together. They had been through all kinds of shit and they had this intense bond.

"The leader of this group was a heroin dealer, and in a way I was fucking with him by treating all his customers. I tried to stay friends so I wouldn't have a war with him. He himself wasn't healthy enough for a treatment--only had half his lungs lef t, from TB. Like most people in his scene he used to be an anti-heroin acidhead and pot-smoker.

" In the end he won. After the Ibogaine people discovered they were alone, and the one thing they had in common was that every day, they used to sit at this guy's table and get together--and that contact would happen through smack, (which was his mon ey). In the end they all fell back to maintain their social contact, and because the Ibogaine effect was wearing off."

The problem was that after treating people who lived in Rotterdam, Utrecht and Amsterdam, Geerte would have to take several train trips just to get the focus group together to talk. Some didn't even have phones. When she finally lost the war with the smack dealer, she realized it couldn't just be her, Nico and Josien doing the treatments. It had to be on the clinical level, by re-habs who could follow through with employment, housing, support groups, everything. Or the underground movement would have to grow--which it wasn't doing because all the people who were treated just wanted to get on with their lives where they'd left off when they became addicted.

A lot of things happened fast right after Nico got treated--the snowball effect. After Josien got treated, she, Nico and Geerte went to see Professor Dzoljic, who was the first to experiment in rats with Ibogaine and morphine self-administration. Dzo ljic was interested in the activities of the treatment group, but not involved in the actual treatments.

Then, after Hi-Res succeeded in getting one small town newspaper to publish a story about Ibogaine, Charlie Kaplan was fired as head of the Addiction Research Center at Erasmus Universtiy. Charlie was the one who got Sisko and Nico to connect, but he never officially witnessed a treatment. However, he made the mistake in answering questions from this reporter about his involvement without proper clearance. The headline said A Cure For Addiction. But when they called Erasmus University and asked ab out one of their professors being associated with these treatments, Erasmus didn't want to be held responsible, so they dissociated themselves and fired Charlie.

So Nico's boss was fired. It was the middle of the summer. Nico started to put all Geerte's focus group data in his personal computer. Charlie did manage to get a German scientific researcher involved, doing a project for a thesis, and because she was genuinely interested in junkies. Nico really wanted to start a whole new life--without junkies--but he didn't because his field researcher job was well-paying. Just before she left for New York, Geerte's best friend died on the operating table of dir ty needles and bad heroin. She had to take care of his wife.

When she brought the work she'd done on the Hi-Res computer to Nico so he could enter it on the computer at Erasmus, they found they had a basic disagreement--
"What we really have to do is sit down with the drug rehabs and tell them Ibogaine is out there," said Geerte, "so they come foreward with the interest and the money for the next treatments."

Nico did not want the rehabs involved: "If I wanted to be treated, I'd want tobe treated in a situation like we treated out friends in--in a house, treated by ex-junkies, not by some doctor in a clinical situation."

"I agree that should be happening," said Geerte, "but it also should behappening on a bigger level. We can't treat thousands of people. They can. We should be working on two levels instead of one."

"I don't believe in clinical settings," Nico told her. "We should keep the ritual involved with it.."

Geerte agreed on some level, and sought consensus-- "We could train the rehabs."

"No." Nico insisted. "If you haven't had the Ibogaine experience, you can't know how to treat other people, becaue you don't know what they're going through. You're going to doctors with all these inputs connected to you. They're going to hook you up with all these machines, all kinds of experiments."

Nico did two more treatments--the couple from the Rotterdam Central Station--just when Sisko was treating some one else in another part of Rotterdam, so there were three treatments going on at once, with available paraclinicians completely overstretch ed. This woman at Nico's couldn't sleep and he didn't give her any sedatives. She was up for three or four days in a row, totally psychotic. Nico went out to get a doctor on a bicycle. He didn't even have a phone. He didn't come back for a whole day, whi ch totally exasperated Sisko.
Sisko concluded that if Nico--who was already refusing to bring in the drug re-habs, or share data on any of the Dutch treatments--wouldn't cooperate with Sisko in doing treatments, he would cut off Nico's supply of Ibogaine.

This episode, when Geerte heard about it in New York, convinced her treatments must be done by a team, since no one person can really understand a personality. "You have to do it as a group, and not do a treatment here and there at the same time. Nico should have kept working with Sisko, but Sisko cut Nico off, and from that moment on, nothing happened, the whole year I was in New York, from Sept. '90 to June, 1991.

"In June, 1991, I walked back into Nico's house and asked-- where's my data, where's my computer work? Turns out the guy has done hardly anything, hasn't set up the focus groups, hasn't kept up any of the people we treated. He's sitting there talking about going to big annual international conferences to talk about Ibogaine, going to Zurich, to needle park..."

"I don't want to hang out with the junkie scene any more," Nico was saying. "I just want to treat addicts"
"This is not the right attitude," Geerte interjected. "I'm sorry, but I'm not going to work with you if you're in this state of mind." Geerte was living at Nico and Josien's house with Adam, her new boyfriend from New York. Adam was a member of the New York band Missing Foundation. As soon as they got to Holland they got to be junkies again with three weeks because the Dutch smack was so intense. Finally Geerte sat down with Nico and sighed--

"I don't want be a junkie again, I'm sick of it." And Nico said, "I was cleaning my bookshelf and I found three doses of Ibogaine behind the books."

"What?" asked Geerte. And Nico was introducing this guy, and saying "I want to treat this dude from the train station...," when Geerte broke in-- "You fucking asshole! Why don't you treat me? I'm the one putting all the years of work into this project , and I'm the one hooked again, and I want another treatment!"

Adam wanted to be treated as well, so eventually Nico agreed to treat both of them. "I actually started crying right before I took the capsules because I knew..." mused Geerte. "This time, knowing I was about to go through this experience. was a pret ty heavy duty decision. The first time you don't know what's going to happen. But the second time you do--which is more difficult. This time I didn't resist the effects, and Nico really helped me. I took it and in half an hour it started working. I lay do wn on my bed and started tripping immediately. The climax is about four hours after you take it. I think I fainted in the middle of my climax. Adam was treated two days before me, and he did very well. It was July, 1991."

The disagreement with Nico persisted. Adam and Geerte had to move into their own place in Rotterdam. They founded DASH--Dutch Addict Self-Help. Theystarted going to all the rehabs in Holland, telling them about Ibogaine. Geerte. mailed out Ibogaine pa ckets. But the reaction was pretty lame.

Adam and Geerte got married. Their honeymoon was the Drug Policy Foundation conference in November, 1991. There they met Eric Fromberg, from the Netherlands Institute on Drug and Alcohol Abuse. They started talking Dutch. He wanted to find out more ab out Ibogaine. When Geerte and Adam went back to Holland, she looked up Fromberg.

"You should help introduce Ibogaine to Dutch scientists, and to the rehabs," she told him.

"I'll only do it if I see some treatments," said Fromberg.
Geerte told Howard, "I have to do some treatments." He said, "Okay, four treatments on the way."

While they were waiting for Howard to arrive, Geerte and Adam went to Berlin, to the European Interest Group of Drug Users, the conference of the junkie unions in Europe. It was January, 1992, and they were discussing human rights for HIV-infected add icts. Geerte and Adam went around telling all the junkiebonds ofEurope about Ibogaine, and most of them responded, "So what? We don't want to get treated. We want free heroin and methadone."

"One of the only ones who picked up on Ibogaine," Geerte continued, "was the organizer of the conference, Herman, who was HIV positive. We wanted ibogaine to be one of their projects, but only Herman supported it, and they wouldn't elect me to anythin g. At the end of the conference, Herman publicly said he would promote Ibogaine. We came back and we thought-- 'If the junkiebonds won't do it, we'll have to work harder than ever, and DASH will be on its own!'" Geerte and Adam went ahead and turned their house into a clinic.
"I was in the middle of an art show when the treatments took place, in early April. Things were very hectic. I had sleep spaces set up for Howard and Norma. I had three treatment rooms--rooms for doctors and everything." DASH supplied two people for t reatment, Lanna and Grinnato. Howard and Norma brought a 19 year old male crackhead who couldn't stop touching the cold sores on his face, and Carol Baker, an HIV positive woman dually-addicted to methadone and heroin.

The treatments went off without a hitch, with Fromberg present throughout, along with two people from Dutch treatment groups and two doctors and Professor Bastiaans. This time the doctors who were there had authorizations from their respective institu tions to be there. They saw the aftereffects, that these people were actually cleaned out.122

"Grinato was a second-timer," said Geerte. "His case was the most successful because he was very motivated. He loved his experience."

Geerte went back to New York soon afterwards. Before she had gone to Holland, she had been forced out of Umbrella House, which she started, as a suspected junkie. The same Lower East Side anarchists who earlier engineered the big split to keep the mar ijuana movement from supporting Ibogaine even broke into Geerte's space to see if they could find bags of dope. She couldn't get her apartment back from Seth Tobocman, who held on to it as a studio while he lived in his own, rented, apartment.

Meanwhile, in Rotterdam, Nico found out he's HIV positive, and decided to take more responsibility for the project, according to Howard and Sisko. Nico has started involving Ibogaine in his work at the University.
The next move is for Fromberg to do treatments on 10 methadone addicts, but he has to first inform the government and get funding. Said Geerte, of the doctors who have witnessed treatments in Holland: "All three of them are scientific witnesses that i t works. That's what you need. You can't be a junkie or an ex-junkie, because people won't take you seriously. But they take doctors seriously. Now we need the money to do and track ten treatments, and fight the Dutch bureaucracy."

[Richard_smoker]

CHAPTER 12: Agent of Coincidence

One day in late July 1990, when he was stuck somewhere with nothing to do, Dana re-read a book he remembered as having offered a glimpse of Ibogaine's proba-ble impact back in 1980-81, when the project was just starting. It was VALIS, by P.K. Dick , based on Dick's famous near death experience (NDE) in 1974, from which he woke up speaking ancientkoine Greek, understanding his own name as Horse-lover (Philip) Fat (German for Dick). Dana was looking for a passage that reads--

"The Empire never ended," Fat quoted to himself. That one sentence appeared over and over again in his exegesis; it had become his tag line. Originally the sentence had been revealed to him in a great dream. In the dream he again was a child, searching dusty used-book stores for rare old science fiction magazines, in particular Astoundings. In the dream he had looked through countless tattered issues, stacks upon stacks, for the priceless serial entitled "The Empire Never Ended." If he could f ind it and read it he would know everything; that had been the burden of the dream.

"Prior to that, during the interval in which he experienced the two-world superimposition, he had seen not only California, U.S.A., of the year 1974 but also ancient Rome, he had discerned within the superimposition a Gestalt shared by both space-time continua, their common element: a Black Iron Prison. This is what the dream referred to as "the Empire." He knew it because, upon seeing the Black Iron Prison, he had recognized it. Everyone dwelt in it without realizing it. The Black Iron Prison was the ir world.

"Who had built the prison--and why--he could not say. But he could discern one good thing: the prison lay under attack. An organization of Christians, not regular Christians such as those who attended church every Sunday and prayed, but secret early Christians wearing light gray-colored robes, had started an assault on the prison, and with success. The secret, early Christians were filled with joy.

"Fat, in his madness, understood the reason for their joy. This time the early, secret, gray-robed Christians would get the prison, rather than the other way around. The deeds of the heroes, in the sacred dream-time...the only time, according to the b ushmen, that was real.

"Once, in a cheap science fiction novel, Fat had come across a perfect description of the Black Iron Prison but set in the far future. So if you superimposed the past (ancient Rome) over the present (California in the twentieth Century) and super-impo sed the far future world of The An-droid Cried Me a River over that, you got the Empire, the Black Iron Prison, as the supra- or trans-temporal constant. Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all i nside of it and none of them knew it--except for the gray-robed secret Christians.

"That made the early, secret Christians supra- or trans-temporal, too, that is to say present at all times, a situation which Fat could not fathom. How could they be early but in the present and the future? And if they existed in the present, why coul dn't anyone see them? On the other hand, why couldn't anyone see the walls of the Black Iron Prison which enclosed everyone, including himself, on all sides? Why did these antithetical forces emerge into palpability only when the past, present and future somehow--for whatever reason--got superimposed?

"Maybe in the bushman's dreamtime no time existed. But if no time existed, how could the early secret Christians be scampering away with glee from the Black Iron Prison which they hadjust succeeded in blowing up? And how could they blow it up back in Rome circa 70 C.E., since no explosives existed in those days? And how, if no time existed in the dream-time, could the pris-on come to an end? It reminded Fat of the peculiar statement in Parsifal: "You see my son, here time turns into space." During hi s religious experience in March of 1974, Fat had seen an augmentation of space: yards and yards of space, extending all the way to the stars; space opened up around him as if a confining box had been removed..."

Now privately Howard, Boaz and Sisko would all sit around reveling in the changes Ibogaine would unleash--"the system-smash," Boaz called it--like a Big Bang without an explosion. But Philip Dick they thought of as science fiction, even though VALIS i s actually a book on gnosticism and the lost plant sacrament of the early Christians, which Dick got to know all about during the '60's while married to the daughter of Episcopal Archbishop Jame Pike's mistress. Pike--the famed companion of Martin Luther King at Selma, Alabama--perished a few years later looking for the missing sacrament in the vicinity of the Dead Sea.

VALIS, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Dick's even more autobiographical chronicle of Bishop Pike's quest and disappearance, provide a fascinating windown into mainstream--if heretical--Christian thought on plant sacraments.

Some months previously, though, Howard had cut a deal with the Belgian pharmaceutical giant Omnichem, which manufactures Ibogaine as a by-product of the leukemia drug nicristine, and by coincidence had decided, instead of dumping it, to stockpile this 99.7% pure (semi-synthetic) Ibogaine. So Howard had cornered the world supply of Ibogaine. And Howard, Boza and Sisko, who were now in the process of reconciling--working it out so that Howard wouldn't have to sue Sisko for infringing on his patent--were uncomfortable with the part about secret early Christians, even though no less an authority than James Fernandez notes the affinity of the Bwiti mindset for Biblical-era parable and proverb.

Moreover, what tied Bwiti specifically to Gnosticism (even ancient Gnosticism seen through the post-quantum eyes of Philip Dick) was that, as Fernandez points out: "For these Bwitists... religion was not a matter of faith... It was a very pragmatic technique for understanding, predicting and controlling--in short a science or pre-science of hidden to things. To believe in something despite lack of evidence or evidence to contrary, which is the Western religious condition, was foreign to their attitudes. Fang had alway had good evidence for their beliefs"--via ready access to plant sacrament, like the Gnostics. In VALIS, in a passaga on Gnostic sacraments, Beal found an Ibogaine parallel which was just uncanny:

48. ON OUR NATURE. It is proper to say: we appear to be memory coils (DNA carriers capable of experience) in a computer-like thinking system which, al-though we have correctly recorded thousands of years of experiential information, and each of us po ssesses somewhat different deposits from all the other life forms, there is a malfunction--a failure--of memory retrieval. There lies the trouble in our particular subcircuit. "Salvation" through gnosis--more properly anamnesis (the loss of amnesia )--although it has individual significance for each of us--a quantum leap in perception, identity, cognition, understanding, world- and self-experience, including immortality--it has greater and further importance for the system as whole, inasmuch as thes e memories are data needed by it and valuable to it, to its overall functioning.

Therefore it is in the process of self-repair, which includes: rebuilding our subcircuit via linear and orthogonal time changes, as well as continual signalling to us to stimulate blocked memory banks within us to fire and hence retrieve what is there.

The external information or gnosis, then, consists of disinhibiting instructions, with the core content actually intrinsic to us--that is, already there (first observed by Plato; viz: that learning is a form of remembering).

The ancients possessed techniques (sacraments* and rituals) used largely in the Greco-Roman mystery religions, including early Christianity, to induce firing and retrieval, mainly with a sense of its restorative value to the individuals;the Gnostics, however, correctly saw the ontological value to what they called the Godhead itself, the total entity.

The more Dana got into it, the more he realized having VALIS** in 1980 was like being handed a roadmap to understanding gnostic substances, Ibogaine and Bwiti, back in the very beginning. But the Ibogaine story is replete with these coincidences.

Take Howard's contact at the University of Miami, Dr. Deborah Mash, who is currently doing the first Phase I clinical (safety) trial with 10 crackheads. Howard met her at the DPF, which mostly gives Ibogaine the cold shoulder because they see it as a diversion from their mission of legalizing cocaine. (Perhaps they fear Ibogaine will prolong prohibition, by fostering the idea the War on Drugs can still be won, if only we had this magic bullet.) But Howard met Dr. Mash at the DPF annual conference. H er work showing cocaine and alcohol combine in the body to form a distinct addictive substance, coca-ethylene, was just what he needed to get his patent for the treatment of polydrug dependency (U.S. Patent #5,152,992, October 6, 1992).

Deborah Mash happens to be married to the Chairman of the Democratic Committee of Dade County. The Florida primary was very important to Clinton, so Mash was able to arrange a meeting with Hillary. After briefing her for more than an hour on the Ibog aine Project, Mash secured her promise to do something about Ibogaine if and when the Clintons got to the White House.

Also, the prospect of Mash's IND application for the Phase I trial being ap-proved by FDA--and Howard pulling an end-run on the MDD--has kept up the pres-sure on Vocci to move ahead, despite countervailing static in the system. After tor-pedoing the meeting between ACT UP and CASA, Herb Kleber went into overdrive behind the scenes, activating his cronies salted away in NIDA's peer review process to cut off new grants for Ibogaine in the regular extra-mural system--the mechanism outside the MDD that G lick used to fund all his research. (However--since as many animal studies came out supporting Ibogaine in 1992 as in all previous years com-bined--this was kind of like closing the barndoor after the livestock are long gone.)

None of this became known for months. What was obvious--after Glick told the ALBANY TIMES-UNION in October of '91 that Ibogaine represented "the strang-est coalition I've ever been involved in"-- was a long dry spell in the papers: noth-ing on Iboga ine being fast-tracked, nothing on ACT UP or Dhoruba joining the fray. Press releases that went out were up against the experts, and in drug-free America, reporters take their cue from the experts. Most of them thought the Staten Island Project was a bout as likely as some Japanese cut off an Island at the end of WW II coming up on their own with the Atomic Bomb.

But then coincidence intervened again--in the form of a disgruntled ex-Yippie, thrown out by Alice T. fourteen years ago for robbing Studio 10 blind, who, claiming to act still on behalf of Abbie Hoffman and the SOHO WEEKLY NEWS, still makes crank ca lls to 9 Bleecker every morning between 6 and 7 AM. He knows Dana can't go back to sleep. Since 1979 he's been trying to make Beal so fried he can't function. He makes obscene phone calls to the kids, sex calls to Alice, anti-Semite calls if you're Jewish , etc.

In the last three years or so, he's escalated, putting up stickers on phones all over the city for non-existent whorehouses (Madame Alice, etc.) and sex services (gay dating club, sperm bank) so Alice would get twenty crank calls a day from aggressive weirdos. Alice is unflappable, though, so Hank the Skank escalated again. In April of '92 he put up a sticker that said, "DRUG MULES: Earn Big Bux--Call 212 677-4899," figuring he'd get Dana in trouble with his probation officer. It did cause an invest igation by Telco security. But instead of the DEA, a PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER reporter called up--Andy Maykuth from the New York bureau--and Dana said: "Oh, a sticker. It's put up by a cranker in Brooklyn who's trying to discredit what we really do, which is to work on a cure for hard drugs, an African rainforest alkaloid called Ibogaine."

After ten minutes Maykuth agreed a crank from Brooklyn wasn't much of a story--"But maybe we can do something with the Ibogaine." Howard was in Lyden, the Netherlands, doing a series of treatments. Dr. Baastians, the Dutch psychiatrist who has to sign off with the Dutch government for each Ibogaine treatment, was too old to travel. Dr. Baastians, who pioneered treatment of concentration camp survivors with LSD, lives in Lyden. He'd just had triple-bypass heart surgery, and since he insisted on sitti ng in on the 24-hour-a-day treatments himself, the strain was so great Howard, Norma and the treatment team thought more than once they might lose him.

But the treatments were successful, and in early May Dana brought Howard to the floor of ACT UP with one of his successes: Carol Baker, the first HIV-positive person treated with Ibogaine. She'd been dually addicted, using 80 mg. of metha-done to get through the day, and $250 worth of heroin to get through the night. As a successful real estate broker she could afford it. But she had no veins left, and she wanted to live out her life clear of the methadone fog.

After an uneventful 22 hour treatment and a short nap, she awoke feeling like "her armor had been stripped away." She was one of the first to fly back by way of the University of Miami, where Lotsof had set up his own post-treatment evaluations with D r. Mash and Dr. Sergio Ramirez." I kicked methadone once be-fore," she told ACT UP, "and it was five months of Hell. This time I woke up, I hadn't had a fix in 24 hours, and I wasn't dopesick. It was like a miracle."

The visualizations weren't like LSD, she said: "You see millions of visions when you close your eyes. But when you open them, you come back to where you are. You realize it was all mental." ACT UP loved it--this little woman with HIV, de-toxed with on e ibogaine treatment. Andy Maykuth of the INQUIRER, sitting in the audience, could feel it. One thing led to another, and on July 4, 1992, in Philadelphia, the INQUIRER published "It's From an African Shrub. Howard Lotsof Says it Got Him off Heroin and C ocaine: TO BATTLE ADDICTION, HE ADVOCATES USE OF A DRUG." It was the lead head-line on page one: a Declaration of Independence for Addicts.

And best of all, when Dana appeared three days later for another adjournment on his probation violation (in Manhattan Court, not Queens), he could point to himself quoted in it: "Ibogaine kind of knocks you on your butt,which is good because you ca n't go out and get drugs. By the time the ibogaine wears off, you don't have any craving."

"Your Honor," he said, "I just want to say that because of your ruling allow-ing me to travel and lobby the National Institute on Drug Abuse, this breakthrough treatment for addiction has been fast-tracked by the Federal government."

Sisko and Howard, though, were disappointed the story focus was still on a small cast of Lower East Side characters--that it failed to tell how in the past 18 months support for Ibogaine had metastasized beyond its countercultural roots. ACT UP was me ntioned way down in the text. Nothing on Dhoruba or Black community support. So while everyone else was in Holland for the AIDS Confer-ence, Dana put together an Ibogaine workbook with ACT UP's xerox document-maker. It had all the available animal studies , the patents, the human anecdotal stuff, ACT UP correspondence with the government, with a couple introductory articles up front. Beal began sending the book plus the 60 minute augmented Nico tape out to every science writer, every drug reporter, every A IDS writer at every newspaper in the country.

He could add or subtract documents at will with the xerox, so for the August 4th Harlem Hospital gig, he added the African anthropological data, plus 20th Century documents relevant to the genesis of the Project, like the 1955 Harris Isbell letter, s elections of VALIS and the original Black Panther "Capitalism Plus Dope Equals Genocide."

He was rushing to finish before his trial date of August 7. But then another Ibogaine coincidence intervened. Out in Sonoma, California, Dennis' friend Brownie Mary Rathbun was busted blending 2 pounds of marijuana in brownies for AIDS patients. Aft er Brownie Mary hit CNN, Dana knew that in a few months, the publicity from her case would turn the country around on medical marijuana. He got another affadavit from Kunstler asking for a long adjournment. The Judge gave him until October 1st. He spent the next day waiting for Dennis and Brownie Mary to fly in for the Maury Povitch show, serenely cleaning up pages of the workbook on the xerox.

A few weeks later he added a section on waking REM, when David Goldstein turned up a new paper by H. Deportere,"Neocortical Rhythmic Slow Activity During Wakefulness and Paradoxical Sleep in Rats." Deportere indicated Ibogaine tremor and behav ioral immobility were clearly a function of stimulation of acetyl-choline pathways--the ones active during sleep and REM (i.e, the Rapid Eye Movement during dreams). Dana threw in an article he'd been saving since Janu-ary from the NEW YORK TIMES scie nce section on dreaming, which contained a paragraph that reminded him of all the accounts of Howard, Nico, etc., of the sensa-tion of travelling at tremendous speeds through space, or down a tunnel, whichsaid:

Another nerve cell circuit connects to the place in the brainstem where movements like walking or running are triggered... When a group of cells in this region are triggered by an as-yet undetermined chemical signal...the stimulation helps bring on the muscle paralysis typical of REM sleep. At the same time glutamate, a brain chemical that excites neurons, is active. This might explain a paradox of REM sleep...that the eyeballs move and the body twitches even though the dreamer cannot move his slee ping body...

Changes of Scene

Because the gait center of the brainstem is activated in REM sleep, Dr Hobson said, "You are rarely stationary in a dream. You run, walk, skip, drive, fly; you are almost always moving forward." ("Scientists Unravelling C hemistry of Dreams," by Sandra Blakeslee)

During the ten treatments she did, Geerte says the muscles and eyeballs twitched like that during the entire visualization phase and even the beginning of the next phase, the one Sisko says gave him access to his "hereditary archive"--the ancestors. Ho wever, since Deportere indicated an EEG signature of true REM activ-ity was absent on Ibogaine, Dana modified the characterization of the visualization phase to "REM-like."

In late August the Queens Judge dropped a bombshell, ruling out a defense of medical necessity--because marijuana only relieves the symptoms of AIDS. Every-one began to assume Dana would be in prison, out of the game for a couple years. And Carlo wa s so intimidated by the opposition in the bureaucracy that he didn't even want to talk about it on the phone.

Dana sent him the revised work-book. He told him Clinton was going to win the election for sure, and that Mash had already talked to Hillary. And then he pointed Carlo to a passage in the Ibogaine book from VALIS, from the Book of Daniel, which Ph ilip Dick believed refered to Nixon, but due to the vagaries of the xerox had come out across from J. Edgar Hoover's memo (See composite on the facing page.) on stopping the rise of a Black Messiah: "In the last days of those kingdoms, When their sin is at its height, A king shall appear, harsh and grim, a master of stratagem. His power shall be great, he shall work havoc untold; He shall work havoc on great nations and upon a holy people. His mind shall be ever active, And he shall succeed in his crafty designs; He shall conjure up great plans. And, when they least expect it, work havoc on many. He shall challenge even the Prince of Princes. And be broken, but not by human hands." "Look at the last line," Dana told him. "What do you mean, not by human hands?" asked Carlo. "Ibogaine, of course... Bwiti, as it were. See--the police state of Nixon and Hoover left us has never been overthrown. But we believe so many changes are going to flow from Ibogaine that in four years, the opposition won't have a niche to come bac k to. Just relax, and let the Ibogaine do its thing." But Carlo was still apprehensive. And the minute he left Baltimore to come up for his radio-medicine board Sept 14th, calls started coming in to his bosses at the ARC from Herb Kleber: "What is Contoreggi up to? Who's he seeing in New York?" Kleber clearly didn't want Contoreggi getting together with ACT UP. CASA had good intelligence on ACT UP. Richard Elovitch had left the organization to advise the American Medical Foundation for AIDS Research (AMFAR) from a new position at GMHC (Gay Mens' Health Crisis), miffed that his seminars with 12-step experts from Columbia's Substance Abuse Division were no longer getting alot of play on the floor. But he still had eyes and ears in ACT UP. Both he and Kleber had a lot to lose if an acknowle dged clean needle expert came in and validated Ibogaine, providing the critical mass to push ACT UP into some kind of mass action. Carlo also had no authorization from Grudzinskas to address ACT UP, and feared doing so as a private citizen might endanger his new position "in the loop.' On Sunday night he talked to a reporter who'd just interviewed Kleber extensively, preparing a piece on Ibogaine, and what he heard freaked him out so much that Monday morning Carlo cancelled his scheduled appearance at the ACT UP Monday night meeting. Dana was able to get an instant vote to zap CASA based on Kleber's interference. But a seed of do ubt had been planted in ACT UP, and the zap was very small. Howard, Boaz and Carlo were all a-dither over a new finding by a researcher at the ARC named Molliver. Molliver had discovered some brain toxicity in rats at 100 mg/kg (injected intraperitoneally, which is twice as toxic as giving it orally, making i t equivalent to 11 times Lotsof's therapeutic dose). Howard was convinced this was a manuever to slow down Deborah Mash's IND at the FDA, so MDD could get their IND approved first--when they were good and ready. But Contoreggi was more excited scienti fically--because such selective toxicity is often a good clue to where a receptor site is. Here was possible evidence of the elusive Ibogaine receptor site, in a part of the brain considered unrelated to the dopamine "pleasure pathway"--all the way back, in the cerebellum. Instead of appearing at the ACT UP meeting, however, that morning Contoreggi went up to Kleber's 168th St. offices at Columbia's Substance Abuse Division to talk to a lower eschelon person who was his contact there. He was somewhat relieved after tha t meeting. But Dana had also leveled with him about the degree to which he was a pot activist, and Carlo was wary of even talking. He had the Ibogaine workbook, though, with the articles on REM. On October 1st, the judge in Queens demanded that Beal produce his lawyer for trial October 9th. No more affadavits. Bill's helpers prepared a massive Clayton motion--essentially a motion "in the higher interest of justice"--that the need of soci-ety as a whole for Dana's Ibogaine work should be balanced with the good he was doing getting medical-grade instead of moldy marijuana to PWAs, and the charges be dismissed. The Clayton, thick as a book, was delivered October 8th. To rule, the judge had to read the appendix, which contained the entire ACT UP workbook, dense with impenetrable rat studies. She didn't want to do that, so on October 9th, she pressured the prosecution to offer a 60-day plea bargain. Dana didn't lik e the compromise, but relented when the judge agreed her earlier ruling against medical necessity pot defenses would not constitute a precedent in other AIDSs cases --in effect nullifying her earlier decision. Bill assured him it would play in the med ia as a victory, a judgement that was borne out when the DAILY NEWS ran an article the next week reporting a big win for medical marijuana for people with AIDS. It even mentioned his Ibogaine work, and the November 20 sentencing date gave him time to do a presentation at the annual DPF Conference. It also gave him time to go to the September 22nd protest by ACT UP, the Green Panthers and NORML at the Dept. of Health and Human Services, against the cut-off of medical marijuana to people with AIDS. Naturally D.C. ACT UP flew Brownie Mary and De nnis Peron in for the event. HHS is just 2 blocks from Tim Westmoreland's office, so that Dana was able to set up a last-minute meeting with Tim, Dennis and Brownie Mary which explored giving states local option on medical marijuana. The HHS zap dominate d D.C. airwaves, and in the superheated pre-election atmosphere, reverberated across the country.. Best of all, after five weeks, Carlo called Beal rather than the other way around. His confidence was waxing as the election neared, and he seemed to feel ACT UP connections might be useful under the new regime. Dana told him that with funding until 1996, Califano and Kleber seemed to have designed CASA to sit out the next four years on the outside, looking in. But then another Ibogaine coincidence took over. All the books and tapes Beal had been sending out bore fruit in the best article yet, in the Science Section of the BOSTON GLOBE. The reporter, Deborah Kong, actually read all the rat studies, so she sp otted the efficacy. She didn't feel it necessary to "balance" the article with comments from skeptics too lazy to look at the data. A short version was reprinted all over the U.S. And at NEW YORK NEWSDAY, where Spencer Rumsey had been blocked by higher ups from getting an article published for three years, the GLOBE piece became ammunition to guilt-trip his editors: "You guys let me get scooped again!" On November 19th, the Queens judge picked up her NEWSDAY and found a massive, four page feature on Ibogaine, which mentioned AIDS, ACT UP and the Black Panthers, even though interviews with Dana and Dhoruba had been cut due to space considerations. Th e next day Bill Kunstler walked into court with Dana and asked that the 60 day sentence be changed to some kind of community service. And when Bill got to the part about the NEWSDAY article, Judge Corrado said: "I read my NEWSDAY yesterday, Mr. Kunstler. " She wanted to change the jail time to com-munity service on the spot, pending a letter from ACT UP Housing Works, the largest provider of housing for PWA's in New York. Dana was out--at least until the DA in the case pressured Judge Corrado to change her mind, In December he talked to Carlo again. Carlo was very excited. The receptor site in the cerebellum tied it all together-- Ibogaine tremor, behavioral immobili ty, acetylcholine pathways, visualizations, everything. The cerebellum governs input from the muscles, joints and tendons; it regulates balance. It lets you know where you're located in space, and what your body's position is in it. It's where you lear n to walk when you're one year old. An Ibogaine receptor in the cere-bellum means that true addiction involves the same kind of deep conditioning of the cerebellum as learning to walk. Addiction doesn't even happen at the so-called common narcotic recept or, where dopamine acts, butthrough the pleasure pathways, in the cerebellum. Addiction involves the same circuits as learning to walk. And just like walk-ing, once you learn how to shortcircuit the conscious brain--once you're addicted--you do it without thinking about it. The addict's feet literally walk him down to the dope spot on their own. But that means there's no "magic bullet" for addiction without going into the cerebellum. Carol Baker said that once the craving for heroin used to lock in, she could never just break out of the routine of going to cop and walk away. After Ibogaine she was always able to divert herself into doing something else--cleaning up, watching television, anything as long as it wasn't going to cop. There's no cerebellar action without the tremor or visualizations, either. The acetylcholine pathways involved in REM, in dreaming--as the SCIENCE TIMES said ---key right into the location in the brain for walking, running, moving, and that's the cere bellum. Ibogaine works through the acetylcholine pathways, therefore there can be no interrupter effect without behavioral immobility and tremor, both effects of acetylcholine. Dana and Carlo each had pre-release copies of a monograph by Robert Goutarel, the father of modern Ibogaine research, and Carlo refered to a passage at the end: "Barrass, B.C. and Coult (1972) demonstrated that ibogaine inhibits the oxidation of 121serotonin by a monoamine oxidase (MAO), ceruloplasmin, and catalyzes the oxidation of catecholamines by the same substrate. "Indeed, Ibogaine is a potent serotoninergic that has the ability to reduce the level of cerebral catecholamines. This decrease in the level of catecholamines, dopamine in particular, explains the results described recently on the blockade of the stimulation of mesolimbic and striatal dopamine induced by morphine or cocaine. The decrease in the level of catecholamines and the joint increase in the cerebral serotonin level result in a suppression of REM sleep and the appearance of hallucinatory phenomena (C. Debru, 1990). "LSD, like Ibogaine, is a potent serotoninergic that inhibits the oxidation of serotonin and catalyzes the oxidation of catecholamines by MAO. "However, there is an enormous difference between these two alkaloids: LSD is active at doses of less than a milligram. Its activity is difficult to control and the hallucinatory phenomena produced belong to a high and angelic domain of esthetic sensa tions, whereas Ibogaine is hallucino-genic only at does in excess of 100 mg, and the domain of the oneirophrenic substance is that of the subterranean world of Freud, of animal impulse and of regression. "Let us note that serotonin is the neurotransmitter of the cerebral parasympathetic system, catecholamines being neurotransmitters in the cerebral orthosympathetic system, and that the negative chronotropic and inotropic effects as well as the arousal -producing action of Ibogaine are nullified by atropine, an acetylcholine antagonist, acetylcholine being the neurotransmitter of the autonomic nervous system. "The long waking dream period that follows the absorption of iboga or ibogaine at a subtoxic dose (or oneirophrenic dose according to Naranjo) appears to be responsible for a temporary destructuring of the ego, followed by its restructuring. "This hypothesis is consistent with the observations made by the ethnologists in their studies of the Mitsogho Bwiti, and may be compared to the hypotheses of Michel Jouvet and Sir Francis Crick (C. Debru, 1990) on the role of dreams in the programing and deprograming of basic behavior patterns, resulting in a new individuation of the human brain. "Normally, the stages of wakefulness of the human brain are: waking, NREM (slow wave or deep) sleep, PGO (pontogeniculo-occipital) waves, and REM (rapid eye movement or paradoxical) sleep. REM sleep is the period of dreams. "Michel Jouvet and Sir Francis Crick consider PGO waves to be the principal coding tool that acts at the cortical level in recording the genetic and epigenetic acquisitions necessary for the individuation of the human brain. "In addition, through random activation mechanisms, the PGO waves eliminate from certain types of neuronal networks an informational overload linked to pathological behavior. This is what C. Debru calls "cleaning out the neuronal circuitry." "REM sleep apparently undertakes a sorting out process among the "residues" stirred up by the PGO wave sleep pattern and disposes of these residues during dreaming. "Michel Jouvet (letter of November 7, 1990) wrote: "The oneiric effects observed in humans and which are produced by hallucinogens do not enable us to approach the dream mechanism directly, because it does appear that these two phenomena cannot be link ed together as one. "We know, however, that the principal difference between dreams and hallucinations resides in the way in which the stages of wakefulness are organized, with the suppression of REM sleep and the intrusion of PGO waves in the arousal (waking) stage and i n NREM (or slow) sleep. "The new organization becomes: waking (arousal) stage, stage of PGO waves, hallucination stage, sleep stage, and it appears possible that hallucinatory manifestations, the waking dream, eliminate "residues" stirred up by the PGO wa ve pattern in the absence of REM sleep."--(Pharmacodynamics and Therapeutic Applications of Iboga and IbogaineRobert Goutarel, with Otto Gollnhofer and Roger Sillans, French National Scientific Research Center) "You were right," exulted Carlo. "Ibogaine is fundamentally different from the 'clear' psychedelics. And Howard is right in that there's no way to duplicate the Ibogaine effect without the visualizations! It is a waking dream--but REM-like, not tr ue REM." What it is exactly is explained in Goutarel's next lines:
"Near Death Experiences "According to the Mitsogho, the initiate will see the Bwiti only twice in his life: on the day of his initiation and on the day of his death. "This means that the visions at the approach of death, what are called near death experiences (NDE), are the same as those termed normative visions. "We know that at the time of dying, some individuals see their whole life pass before them. In those who are "rescued from death," a spectacular transformation is observed. They no longer fear death, they feel stronger, more optimistic, calmer, and con template their life more positively." The brain is capable of generating another state, which the conscious mind recognizes as "dreamlike." Normally the waking mind has only indirect access to the activities of the acetylcholine pathways. Normally the activity of the sleeping brain only se eps into consciousness slowly--during the few minutes of REM we get every night. But a real emergency can trigger a survival reflex, the NDE, which gets both halves of the brain up and functioning stereoscopically, at the same time. The serotoninergic pathways, organized as the ego, get direct access to all the disorganized acti vity of the cholinergic pathways, which are perceived as "five or six television programs going at once." Ibogaine triggers the NDE reflex. The "splitting of the skull," which releases the visions, is the same as the jerk you sometimes feel just as you're falling asleep, greatly amplified because your serotonin and acetylcholine are pumping at the same ti me, and your DA is way down, which normally doesn't happen. But in the NDE, the conscious mind gets access to PGO wave material: direct genetic instructions from the non-nucleated genetic material in all of your cells. These are the genes that are passed on directly from your mother; they don't lose anything from generation to generation, unless a cosmic ray hits them. You get nothing from your father but nucleated genes passed on through the sperm, which is the ge netic equivalent of an earth satellite. The egg by comparison is a minature planet. Primitive cells that replicate by division, like amoebas, pass all their memory along through these non-nucleated genes. But about a billion years ago some cells invented sex, swapping of genetic instuctions contained in the nucleus via mitosis. Much more complex organisms became possible, but to maintain access to cellular memory, through the acetylcholine pathways, they had to sleep . All the activity of the sleeping mind is summarized several times a night in the REM phase, which when you remember your dreams, makes a "report" from the unconscious to the conscious mind. Sleep doesn't just raise cellular memories to consciousness, though; every night your mind makes a "back-up" of the day's memories all the way down in the non-nucleated genetic material of the cells. Since these little packets of information don't de grade much from generation to generation, you have ancestral memories going back a quarter of a million years. But always through the mother, which is why Fred, on Ibogaine, experienced the concentration camps through the eyes of his mother and not his fa ther. The thing is that these cellular memories might have in them the informa-tion you need to survive in a real emegency, when you have no chance to sleep until the answer just comes to you, in a dream. There's a lot of situations, a lot of scenarios in a quarter million years. So before there was language, before there was writing, we developed the NDE, this trick reflex that allows the conscious mind to access PGO wave activity directly. Ibogaine triggers the NDE reflex chemically, without having to be near death. Ibogaine turns the serotoninergic and cholinergic pathways into a super-augmented, "sterescopic" entity, capable of scanning ancestral memory in the nonnucleated genetic material of your cells: the ancestors.

[Richard_smoker]

CHAPTER 13: Bwiti



The first time he could sit down with Dhoruba after he came back from Ghana, Dana told him that before, he hadn't wanted to tell him what to do--but that coming back was the right decision. And he had him read the following passage, and Dhoruba starte d as soon as he read the first sentence, as if he'd been thinking exactly along these lines. It read, in part:

.

"The goal of your lives has been reached. I am here to tell you this. Do not fear...

"A time of trial and delusion and wailing lies ahead because the grim king, the king of tears, will not surrender his power. But you will take his power from him; I grant you that authority in my name, exactly as I granted it to you once before, whe n the grim king ruled and destroyed and challenged the humble people of the world.

"The battle which you fought before has not ended, although the day of the healing sun has come. Evil does not die of its own self because it imagines that it speaks for god. Many claim to speak for god, but there is only one god and that god is man himself.

"Therefore only those leaders who protect and shelter will live; the others will die. The oppression lifted four years ago, * and it will for a little while return. Be patient during this time; it will be a time of trials for you, but I will be wit h you, and when the time of trials is over I shall sit down on the judgement seat, and some will fall and some will not fall, according to my will, my will that comes to me from the father, back to whom we all go, all of us together.

"I am not a god; I am human. I am a child, the child of my father, which is Wisdom Him-self. You carry in you now the voice and authority of Wisdom; you are, therefore, Wisdom, even when you forget it. You will not forget it for long, I will be ther e and I will remind you.

"The day of Wisdom and the rule of Wisdom has come. The day of power, which is the enemy of Wisdom, ends. Power and Wisdom are the two principles in the world. Power has had its rule and now it goes into the darkness from which it came, and Wisdom a lone rules.

"Those who obey power will succumb as power succumbs."Those who love Wisdom and follow her will thrive under the sun. Remember, I will be with you, I will be in each of you from now on. I will accompany you down into the prison of necessary; I will speak in the courts of law to defend you; my voice will be heard in the land, whatever the oppression.

"Do not fear; speak out and Wisdom will guide you. Fall silent out of fear and Wisdom will depart you. But you will not feel fear because Wisdom herself is in you, and you and she are one."Formerly you were alone within yourselves; formerly you were solitary men. Now you have a companion who never sickens or fails or dies; you are bonded to the eternal and will shine like the healing sun itself." (VALIS, Philip Dick)

There's more, but after that Dhoruba talked with Dana about how in the African tradition, the NDE is considered a medical fact. And then Dana said: "You know, my orientation is primarily scientific. For the first 8 years of the project I wouldn't go al l the way for Ibogaine--make it my main public focus--until I was convinced in 1989, by the evidence. We've only treated a handful of people, but already the world is being changed through them. Maybe there is some kind of force working through Iboga ine.

"Something is happening. Remember, Bush is Nixon--the forces he represents killed off all the potential Black leaders once before. But God is not mocked. When He's fixing to send a Messiah, He cannot be thwarted. He can send one who can't be killed, and can't be stopped.

"Because of AIDS, the System is going to have to use Ibogaine. And then Bwiti will be alive in thousands of junkies and crack-heads, and they will be tranformed into the force that overthrows the Oppressors. What I'm trying to say is, win yo ur case, but husband your resources. Neither one of us has to die. The fix is in. Cosmically."

About a year earlier, Dana was supposed to meet Howard and Norma at Flo Kennedy's 75th birthday party. It was a cold night; they never made it in from Staten Island. But there at the party were Charles Rangel and New York Attorney General Bob Abrams, whose wife Diane is one of Flo's best friends. Beal gave everyone Ibogaine stuff, and renewed his acquaintance with Flo, who he hadn't seen much since the '70's. He also met Flo's friend Lillian Smith, a producer for Phil Donohue. For about 4 months he tr ied to get a show on Donohue about the needle exchange controversy in Boston, with Jon Parker and Ellis-Hagler, but it didn't happen. He got to know who to call at the show, though.

Howard and Norma wound up meeting Flo Kennedy at a later date, and Flo really hit it off with Norma. Flo Kennedy became a big Ibogaine supporter. She was Billie Holliday's lawyer for her smack busts; today Flo's the executor for the estates of Billie Holliday and jazz junkie great Charles "Bird" Parker. She also became a big Dhoruba supporter--liked his feminist politics--and threw a party for him when he got back from Ghana. The minute Dana got back from the April 10th meeting with Ingrid Kolb, he go t Flo to write up a note to Diane and Bob, about how effective Dhoruba had been as a negotiator, and how important he was to the Ibogaine project. Then he dropped the note and a copy of the Ibogaine tape off at the Abrams' house on East 86th.

The morning after the rioting began in Los Angeles, he called Flo and said, "You ought to call your friend Lillian, and see if you can get Dhoruba on Donohue."Flo never makes phonecalls, but she told him to leave a message on Lillian's tape, saying Flo recommends Dhoruba. He did that, and then he left a message on Dhoru-ba's tape saying Donohue's producers might call, but that he should call them. With-in hours, Dhoruba was on Donohue with Sister Souljah. Overnight, he was a super-star, the most articu late Black radical since Malcolm.

In the selections for the Ibogaine workbook prepared for the Harlem Hospital workshop August 4th, Dana included 3 articles on Bwiti--plus the interview of a European after meeting Bwiti, Nico. The thing is, Bwiti cosmogony is not written down except by Europeans. (Why write down your religion, when you can put in a direct call to God any time you require clarification?) But Barabe summarized it:

"Mebeghe is the name of the divinity in the Fangs (a tribe), a supreme being without mother or father or spouse. It engenders the three divinities by bursting the divine primodial egg.

"Nzame-Mebeghe, God, is born with his brother and sister but remains pure."Nyingone-Mebeeghe, "sister of God,

" the female principle of the universe, goddess of fertility and of the night. At the instigation of Evus, she committed Nsem, incest, with None. As punishment, she must carry the earth on her head.

"None-Mebeghe, the third individual in the divinity, the male principle, has committed Nsem.

"Ekuran has issued forth from the placenta and the umbilicle body of the divine egg. It possesses thunder and makes order reign."Evus, the twin brother of Ekurana, has been punished with a thunderclap on orders from Nzame. He is the tempter and in itiator of Nsem.

"All these divinities are represented in the temple, the place of night-time ceremonies, the place for celebrations on the occasion of feasts and initiations (involving consumption of massive quantities of iboga root, often at puberty), the place for funeral dances on the death of a person of standing. The temple may also serve as a meeting room, as a courthouse or a guard house. It is called Mbandja"--("The Religion of Eboga or the Bwiti of the Fangs," by P. Barabe, May/June 1982)

Note the sexual conservatism: Bwiti is a safe sex-oriented, matriarchal religion, reacting off of a tremendous gonorrhea epidemic at the turn of the Century. The Catholic colonial authorities were prone to harassing Bwiti, so it had a unifying ef fect during the Gabonese drive for independence.

The important part of the initiation is meeting the ancestors, which every one has stored hologramatically in their memory, on the cellular level. Collectively, they are Bwiti. During initiation, the neophyte often meets a guide such as a trusted pa rent, who accompanies him through the visions. Or if there's a special message for them, a certain number meet the Bwiti, the personification of the ancestors who Evans Shultes described as "the universal African Ancestor."

Dana decided selections of VALIS had to go in side-by-side with the Nico interview--both because they contain a number of notes which explain the signifi-cance of what's happening to Nico, and because of striking resemblances between the Bwiti materia ls and the Egyptian Gnosticism of the Nag Hammadi Scrolls which Dick locates at the root of all 3 Monotheisms-- "47. TWO SOURCE COSMOGONY: The One was and was-not, combined, and decided to separate the was-not from the was. So it generated a diploid sac which contained like an eggshell, a pair of twins, each an androgyny, spinning in opposite directions (the YlN & the YANG of Taoism, with the one as the TAO). The plan of the One was that both twins would emerge into being (wasness) sim ultaneously; however, motivated by a desire to be (which the One had implanted in both twins), the counterclockwise twin broke though the sac and separated prematurely; i.e, before fullterm. This was the dark or YIN twin There- fore it was defective. A t full term the wiser twin emerged. Each twin formed a unitary entel- echy, a single living organism made of psyche and soma, still rotating in opposite direc- tions to each other. The fullterm twin, called FORM I by Parmenides, advanced correctly throug h its growth stages, but the pre-maturely born twin, called FORM II, languished.

The next step in the One's plan was that the Two would become the Many, through their dialectical interaction. From them as hyper-universes they projected a hologram-like interface, which is the pluriform universe we creatures inhabit....

"49. Two realms there are, upper and lower. The upper, derived from hyper-universe I or Yang, FORM I of Parmenides, is sentient and volitional. The lower realm or Yin, FORM II of Parmenides, is mechanical, driven by blind, efficient cause, deter ministic and without intelligence, since it emanates from a dead source. In ancient times it was termed "astral determinism." We are trapped, by and large, in the lower realm, but are through the sacraments, by means of the plasmate, extricated. Until a stral determinism is broken, we are not even aware of it, so occluded are we...

"The name of the healthy twin, hyper-universe I, is NOMMO. The name of the sick twin, hyper-universe II, is YORUGA. Their names are known to the Dogon people of Western Sudan in Africa. "50.. The primordial source of all our religions lies with the ancestors of the Dogon tribe..."

The ancestral home of the Fang, before they were pushed south and west to the rainforests of Gabon by the Fulani expansion, was the Savannah of Western Sudan. And according to Fernandez, the destination at the end of the visions for many initiates is a grassy upland resembling nothing so much as the Fang ancestral homeland. There the initiate may find a huge village of the Ancestors, or the clear glass house of their particular guardian angel, or of Bwiti.

The other members of the Project weren't sure the VALIS stuff belonged in an Ibogaine workbook at all, but Beal kept it in subsequent xeroxes, if only so that readers could see the Bwiti elements in the religion of their childhood. Besides, maybe the other predictions would pan out--like Clinton winning the election: "The grim king, the king of tears, will not surrender his power. But you will take his power from him; I grant you that authority in my name, exactly as I granted it to you once b efore, when the grim kingruled and destroyed and challenged the humble people of the world."

Would the Grim King, Bush, join Nixon wandering along the beach, wondering what hit him? Destroyed, like Nixon, by an information shock wave? It was important to Deborah Mash.

On November 4 Bush lost the election, shot down like Nixon, according to most pundits, ("...exactly as I granted it to you once before, when the grim king ruled...") by the last minute disclosures of Special Contragate Prosecutor Lawrence Wa lsh. Bush knew --and most people knew it, but they had forgotten. Walsh reminded them.

Harris Isbell and the other CIA-era researchers considered Ibogaine and the other indole-alkalamines to be "psychotomimetic." In other words, if Nico thinks he met the Supreme Being, Nico is crazy. But Philip Dick says there are two ways to tell a ge nuine theophany from mere delusion. One sign is sudden healing ("It was like a miracle," said Carol Baker). But second, if you are imparted with information which turns out to be true, and which you had no way of knowing, then perhaps the reve lation is genuine. During initiations, Bwiti routinely see future events-- from Fernandez's informant in Chapter 18 seeing his brother lying dead along the road three weeks later, to Geerte's boyfriend Adam seeing his friend nodding off and falling out o f a 14th story window, exactly as it happened months later.

In the NDE, in the dreamtime, the shock of future events is sometimes sharp enough for you to get a preview. Time is not as we ordinarily perceive it. Howard Lotsof crossing the street on Ibogaine turned around and saw seven after-images of himself cr ossing the street behind him. The actual, secret sacrament of Gnosticism-- which the wine and the wafer only represent , according to Dick--confers upon the initiate this same augmented perception of time. But the secret is encrypted in the myth of the cup which caught Christ's blood--the Holy Grail--which Dick could not figure out:

"The leader of the Grail knights, Amfortas, has a wound which will not heal. Klingsor has wounded him with the spear which pierced Christ side. Later, when Kingsor hurls the spear at Parsifal, the pure fool catches the spear--which has stopp ed in midair--and holds it up, making the sign of the Cross with it, at which Klingsor and his entire castle vanish. They were never there in the first place; they were a delusion, what the Greeks call dokas; what the Indians call the veil of maya..

"There is nothing Parsifal cannot do. At the end of the opera, Parsifal touches the spear to Amfortas wound, the wound heals. Amfortas, who only wanted to die, is healed. Very mysterious words are repeated, which I never understood, although I can read German:
"Gesegnet sei dein Leiden,

Das Mitleids hochste Kraft,

Und reinstein Wissens Macht

Denn zagen Toren gab!" "This is one of the keys to the story of Parsifal, the pure fool who abolishes the delusion of the magician Klingsor and his castle, and heals Amfortas' wound. But what does it mean?

"May your suffering be blessed,

Which gave the timid fool

Pity's highest power

Amd purest knowledge's might!" I don't know what this means. However, I know that in our case, the pure fool, Horselover Fat, himself had the wound which would not heal, and the pain that goes with it. All right; the wound is caused by the spear which pierced the Savior's side , and only that same spear can heal it. In the opera, after Amfortas is healed, the shrine is at last opened (it has been closed for a long time) and the Grail itself is revealed at which point heavenly voices say:

"Erlosung dem Erloser!"

Which is very strange, because it means:

"The Redeemer redeemed!"

In other words, Christ has saved himself. There's a technical term for this: Salvator salvandas. The "saved savior."

"The fact that in the discharge of his task the eternal messenger must himself assume the lot of incarnation and cosmic exile, and the further fact that, at least in the Iranian variety of the myth, he is in a sense identical with those he calls--t he once lost parts of the divine self gives rise to the moving idea of the 'saved savior' (salvator salvandas).

"My Source is reputable. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, 1967; in the article on "Gnosticism." I am trying to see how this applies to Fat. What is this "pity's highest power"? In what way does pity have the powe r to heal a wound? Would this, then, make Horselover Fat the Savior himself, the savior saved? That seems to be the idea which Wagner expresses. The savior idea is Genostic in origin. How did it get into Parsifal?

"Maybe Fat was searching for himself when he set out in search of the Savior. To heal the wound made by first the death of Gloria and then the death of Sherri. But what in our modern world is the analog for Klingsor's huge stone castle?

"That which Fat calls the Empire? The Black Iron Prison?

"Is the Empire "which never ended" an illusion?

"The words which Parsifal speaks which cause the huge stone castle--and Klingsor himself --to disappear are: "Mit diesem Zeichen bann' Ich deinen Zauber."

"With this sign I abolish your magic."

The sign of course, is the sign of the Cross. Fat's Savior is Fat himself, as I already figured out; Zebra is all the selves along the linear time-axis, laminated into one supra- or trans-temporal self which cannot die, and which has come back to sa ve Fat. But I don't dare tell Fat that he is searching for himself. He is not ready to entertain such a notion, because like the rest of us he seeks an external savior.'

What is almost overlooked here is that if the healing sacrament of the ancient Gnostics is found--i.e., when the shrine is at last opened after 2,000 years--the living blood of the Savior tranforms any cup it touches, and instantly: the Grail is revealed. This particular passage went into the workbook because the verse of Parsifal Dick says he doesn't understand really encapsulates the central features of Nico's experience, including a line Nico felt w as so important he repeated it four times on the original raw tape:

"If you are resisting suffering, you suffer more.

If you are trying to deny your confusion, you remain confused.

If you are striving for Peace, you find yourself constantly disturbed."

Conversely, the Nico tape perfectly explains the verse of Parsifal which Dick says he doesn't understand. Suffering is "blessed" which frees you from suffering--as in getting you through the withdrawal instead of prolonging it with more hero in. It is also "pity's highest power" (the only meaningful pity)--to free all whose sides have been pierced (until no veins are left) by means of a healing alkaloid. One addict treated at the same time as Carol Baker had the kind of cocaine psychosis w here he thought bugs were under his skin; he'd at picked his face until it was covered with cold sores and zits. In 48 hours it healed. Ibogaine turns out to be the left half of a Kaposi's Sarcoma drug called Vinblastine (dimeric Ibogaine, fro m the Madagas-car periwinkle), and the common component of another KS drug called Vincristine. It's far less toxic than either one. Contoreggi has submited a protocol to study it as an anti-viral; he's writing another for KS. (Rats pre-treated with I bogaine recovered from electro-shock twice as fast as untreated rats.)

According to Dick, healing that seems miraculous is a dead giveaway (along with raising the dead, i.e., the living dead of addiction), but Nico's experience also clears up the other thing Dick can't figure out--what "Purest knowledge's might" is:

"Do you know, now?"

"Yes I know, now."

"So you know; Act like it!"

During the Ibogaine rupture into the dreamtime, the serotonergic pathways react to the 'splitting of the skull'--the shock of the opening up of the cholinergic pathways--by creating the brain's own "windows" program: the movie screen many people desc ribe as opening up on the ceiling or wall, for the visions. It is Nico's "rectangle that opens up," so the Supreme Being can speak to him out of a blue sky. This rectangle is a characteristic "signature" of chaos, one of the higher patterns that emerge s in chaotic phenomena from galactic spirals to conch shells.

It is Parmenides' "perfect" rectangle. The Greeks used it to build the Parthe-non; we use it in playing cards. Its dimensions are always 3 by 5--Fibonacci's con-stant. It's all through the VALIS trilogy, as the "doorway to the Other Realm." To matc h up the transcript of Nico's meeting with God to Dick's observations on Fibonacci's doorway, side by side for easy reference, in such a way that both verses about suffering also come out next to each other, there was no other place to stick Hoover's Bla ck Messiah memo in the Ibogaine workbook but in between them --across from the Book of Daniel verse about the grim king.

The coincidence of those 3 sets of pages forming a hexagram like that, on the first time, it's a billion-in-one. On December 23, 1992, Howard Lotsof and Dana Beal watched from the court room audience as Judge Bruce Allen vacated the life sentence of Dhoruba Bin Wahad for a second time. He found that FBI and Red Squad misconduct was so egregious that it met the test--it had materially influenced the outcome of Dhoruba's trial two decades ago. It was so bad it met thetest, even under the n ew, more restrictive rules. Now the Prosecution would have to do a new trial, with no witnesses, evidence that might be mislaid, years after-wards...the vendetta would become too obvious. And against a regular guest on Phil Donohue. You're talking inter national human rights there, buddy.

But what about the other part of the prediction? ("...not by human hands.." ) To clear the deck, in other words, and let Ibogaine do its work?

The other really important thing that happened in 1992 was that a significant body of scientific evidence coalesced for Ibogaine's efficacy with cocaine in animals. At the June Keystone session of the Conference on Problems of Drug Dependency, M.R. D ziljic presented data showing that Ibogaine diminished cocaine self-administration in rats 90 percent. (On everything else, they injected til they died.) Henry Sershen from the Nathan Kline Institute of Orangeburg, New York, confirmed a reduction of coc aine-induced dopaminergic and locomotor activity with Ibogaine. And Patricia Broderick published a new abstract on further interactions between Ibogaine and cocaine. A scientific consensus was beginning to gather behind Ibogaine's efficacy with cocaine, as it had the year before with morphine. It was bad news from bureaucrats holding out for a cocaine blocker.

There is no currently no known pharmaco-treatment for cocaine. All the maintenance drugs turned out to be cocaine analogs. And the problem with trying to find a cocaine blocker, a la naltrexone, is that a dopamine transporter is not like an opiate r eceptor--you can't "occupy" it without inhibiting DA re-uptake, like cocaine itself, which is why all the "blocker" analogs they've looked at so far have cocaine-like effects. Meanwhile, none of it is effective at stopping cocaine--instead the user is now on two drugs. So the prediction that AIDS would force the system to adopt the Ibogaine procedure because there's no alternative turns out to be true as far as cocaine is involved.

Dhoruba Bin Wahad went out on a limb with the Black community on Ibogaine, He discussed it on WBAI. But especially after his appearance at the Harlem Hospital teach-in, he put the Movement on record for an early community-based trial. He had alrea dy worked through the political implications, and he had always found the people involved to be reliable.

Meanwhile Rommell Washington moved, from Harlem hospital at 135th St. to Reality House at 125th, where Mark Lamontia (one of the same junkie cohort as Fred) was staying in the program only by telling them he was about to go over to Holland to do thi s experimental drug treatment. Mark, who was on 35 mg. of methadone daily, was in imminent danger of being ejected from Reality House because he was never able to keep his urines free of cocaine or heroin for longer than a week.

Back in 1980, when Howard and Norma did the Halloween Smoke-in, the one that marched on the SOHO WEEKLY NEWS to demonstrate against Heroin Chic, Mark Lamontia did the logo for the leaflet--a Halloween jack-o-lantern with hands, dropping joints. All t hese good protest intentions failed to keep Mark, Mario and Fred--the whole crew who went to work for Pope Mickey--from getting strung out on smack in '81 and '82.

Ibogaine was developed to treat that particular crop of kids and now at last, after 13 years, Mark Lamontia was about to go to Holland, to be a subject in a January, 1993 international treatment seminar organized by Sisko, Boaz and Howard. Rom mell Washington signed up to go along to be part of Mark's treatment team. And he got his old boss, Dr. Clark, head of Harlem Hospital's Substance Abuse Unit, to go with them.

Dr Clark joined in Mark's treatment in 8 hour shifts with Rommell, Hans-Georg Behr, Boaz and the Israelis, Sergio Ramirez and Deborah Mash. "What can you tell us," Mash asked Jan Bastiaans, "about how it really works? How many treatments h ave you done?"

Mash was tracking all the treatments on remote video, sending samples of Mark's piss on dry ice to the University of Miami by federal express.

"Only 10 treatments. But you're missing the important thing. It works." And that was the newsflash that Clark took back to Harlem, to the entire Black treatment community--that Ibogaine works, that Mark had come off of 35 mg of methadone in 3 days, with an uncanny absence of withdrawal. (Another subject came off a whopping 125 mgs.!) Fortyfive days later Dr Clark did a complete physical examination of Mark, who was like a new man (of course). Mark's has been the first really rigorous followup: weekly urines, the very thing NIDA MDD has been demanding. You have no idea of what it means to treatment professionals to be able to give a patient something that works. An informational shock wave is sweeping through Harlem, as the word is confirmed by people they respect: It works. It really works.

Shockwaves are ruptures, flashing across the landscape of things-as-usual. In the high energy state within the wave, different mathematics apply; structure that was latent is manifested along the rupture. Take slime mold--it has an interesting chara cteristic. Ordinarily it's a little individual amoeba, but take away its food, and it signals to all the other amoebas, and they start to cluster in wave patterns and form one differentiated animal. The front is a head, the back, a stalk, the body become s spores covered with hard cases. The cases break away, open up--and out come amoebas. Your ancestors are like that. They exist hologramatically on the147

cellular level, in all the non-nucleated genetic material of all humans. The non-nucleated material generates a great weak electro-magnetic aura Philip Dick callsValis.

Holograms are funny; if you break a hologramic plate, the entire hologram-atic image is in every fragment. That's because it's made without lenses, by the direct action of split lasers on a negative. Everything is enfolded in a photographic print that requires the same split laser setup to project a 3-dimensional image. There is no difference between image and object. There is no space, no time, no matter and no mind. Our process of memory seems to work along the same lines, locating the correct m emory in the "print" with the neuro-electric equivalent of the "reference beam" used to read a hologramic print.

V.A.L.I.S. stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. It knows only hologramatically, therefore it perceives the universe as a hologram. It knows everything known to every person, but only in memory. For us to communicate with it is a probl em. Direct communication with creatures via modulation of bio-electric phenomena in the area puts such a load on any nervous system in the neighborhood that it can cause permanent damage. But in the dreamtime, when you have direct access to information stored in your cells, Valis can communicate digitally, via perturbation of non-nucleated genetic material. It can generate the equivalent of a laser reference beam to project a Fibonacci "doorway:" and if the throes of your NDE reflex generate the same chaotic 'attractor' shape, and the two lock together, you have a match, and Nico meets God.

Therefore, VALIS does not rule, but influences outcomes via sychronicity, maximized through free will taking advantage of coincidence. The only thing that can destroy it is for humanity to completely destroy itself. For the first time in history, h owever, that could happen at any moment. In his notes, in a later paragraph of entry 47, on TWO SOURCE COSMOGONY, Philip Dick writes:

It was the One's purpose for our hologramatic universe to serve as a teaching instrument by which a variety of new lives advanced until ultimately they would be isomorphic with the One. However, the decaying condition of hyperuniverse II introdu ced malfactors which damaged our hologramatic universe. This is the origin of entropy, undeserved suffering, chaos and death, as well as the Empire, the Black Iron Prison; in essence, the aborting of the proper health and growth of the life forms withi n the hologramatic universe. Also, the teaching function was grossly impaired, since only the signal from the hyperuniverse I was information-rich; that from II had become noise. The psyche of hyperuniverse I sent a micro-form of itself into hyperuni verse II to attempt to heal it..."

By means of a plant call